Abstract
In the following essay I’m going to take a radical position concerning the tendency to eliminate psychoanalysis from the European Academic field and the failure of psychoanalysts and relational therapists to defend psychoanalysis from such aggression. My question is why in Italy—just to make a local example, which I am involved in—different kinds of psychoanalytical traditions are not able to defend themselves from this attack while in France, for another example, all the different branches of relational therapies have been able to unite in making a common effort to take a position for psychoanalysis. One of the main problems, in my opinion, concerns the constitutive marginality of psychoanalysis in relation to Academic Institutions. In my way of writing, I will use psychoanalysis, with “P” in capital character, when referred to Academia, and psychoanalysis, with no capital character, when referred to clinical practice.
Highlights
University is, by definition, the locus where knowledge is transmitted
Freud e l’ebraismo: Via an operation that radically upset medical thinking from within, and with an argumentation that must have been disturbing to those academics who would have preferred to let it pass in silence, dreams and symptoms took the place that in the Jewish tradition is occupied by sacred texts (ivi, p. 175, translation from Italian by Michael Paysden). How important is it for regular students in current departments of psychology to learn about analyzing dreams, or conversation in therapy, in terms of a sacred test in the Jewish tradition? Is that transmissible? And in which way? I think partially, even not entirely, transmitted, just to give them an idea about what is going to be their future life if they chose psychoanalysis as a job
It would be easy to conclude that psychoanalysis is the realm of “mere opinions”, and certainly this is a facile ideological statement made by academics who believe that science is doing “collective” work in line with the old/new positivistic principles: only quantitative methods, standardization, evidence-based diagnosis
Summary
University is, by definition, the locus where knowledge is transmitted. What does it mean when we are talking about the transmissibility of psychoanalysis?. In Paris, I saw a PhD program for trained psychoanalysts, and from the other, in Rio, I saw psychoanalysis (and other forms of relational therapy, as family therapy) applied to the social field In both cases, the experience of psychoanalysis is something that goes far beyond academy. I know my position risks being biased towards the idea that, in order to teach what we call generically “clinical psychology”, one has to work for several years on the field, and make clinical experiences; one has to have other experiences, for a long period of her/his own life, outside the academy This is the outrageous discourse of psychoanalysis for present-day academic way of thinking about what is an academic career
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