For most of my career, I kept my interest in psychoanalysis largely separate from my work as a professor of bioethics. I was nervous that colleagues and students would find psychoanalysis weird and retrograde, and I had other interests that were more readily accepted.
But in summer 2020 I earned tenure, which gave me a high enough degree of job security to allay my fears. Also, shortly after that, my father died. I had a lot of regrets about our relationship, and these regrets made me feel an urgent need to stop holding back in life and to live as I wanted. I entered personal analysis and decided to pursue clinical training, which meant first earning a degree in social work and then becoming a clinical candidate at my local psychoanalytic institute. These experiences dramatically enhanced my understanding of the transformative impact of psychoanalysis on my own life, and its potential to better the lives of others.
Then, in fall 2022, my university, Saint Louis University, launched a new undergraduate Core Curriculum, which required all incoming students to take one of its new “Ignite Seminars.” These seminars could be on any almost any topic, provided that the instructor was passionate about it—passion which, it was hoped, would “ignite” the minds of students just embarking on their education.
Because psychoanalysis had helped me so much in my life, I was indeed very passionate about give incoming students the chance to use it as a resource in their own lives. Thus, How can psychoanalysis help you to live a better life? became the animating question of my Ignite Seminar, which I called (borrowing from the novel by Georges Perec) “Life: A User’s Manual.”
In designing the reading list, I considered several factors. I had been the co-recipient of a grant from the Teagle Foundation to design an undergraduate program organized around the study of what the Foundation called “transformative texts.” “Life: A User’s Manual” would be a pilot courses in this program as well. Thus, first-year students would have the opportunity to read great psychoanalytic thinkers in their own words. Secondary sources would be used sparingly, in order to illustrate how psychoanalysis had impacted their authors’ lives. I chose works I thought would make psychoanalysis appealing to students deeply concerned with matters of racial, sexual, and gender identity. And because we are members of a Jesuit university, I included some Jesuit authors who engage with psychoanalytic ideas.
Thus we began by reading the opening pages of the Autobiography of Ignatius de Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order. Ignatius describes how, after getting his leg blown to pieces by a cannonball, a series of religious texts helped him shift his vocational hopes from the military to the priesthood. “We all have cannonball moments in our lives,” I told my students—generalizing Ignatius’ experience to moments of disruption that, though initially traumatic, can become generative. Ignatius had realized this counterintuitive potential through his faith. We would see if psychoanalysis could do something similar.
To pursue this question, we turned to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which explores how psychotherapy can help people make meaning from suffering—often by orienting them to some desired future goal. While not a psychoanalyst, Frankl takes Freud seriously, and much of his theory has subsequently been integrated into American psychoanalysis, for example, in the work of Rollo May at the William Alanson White Institute. His book thus proved to be an excellent bridge to our next reading, which addressed both Freud’s work and psychoanalytic practice in the U.S.
This was Roosevelt Montás’ chapter, “Making Peace with the Unconscious: Freud,” from his book Rescuing Socrates. Montás explains Freud’s key concepts by applying them to his own life, including his own experience in analysis. He describes how psychoanalysis helped him to accept desires that his compulsive deference to others had previously compelled him to ignore. In Ignatius and Frankl, the cannonball comes from the outside, an external force that upends one’s life. But, for Freud and Montás, the cannonballs are inside, constituted by our unavowed desires and conflictual feelings—which can be every bit as shattering. The work of life and of analysis is, as Montás shows, to recognize one’s internal cannonballs and to find their more than merely destructive potential—their potential, for instance, as aids to self-understanding and growth.
Montás helped us discuss one of the psychic risks of college, where students are surrounded by many people they might end up slavishly seeking to please—including people like me, their professor. How could they use our course to learn ways of pursuing their own desires—and not just what they thought I desired for or from them? Montás helped us consider how seemingly self-evident aspects of the student-teacher relationship—such as grading—created conditions for both self-realization and self-betrayal.
Now, I thought, my students were ready to begin tackling Freud. We first read his 1915 essay on “Repression,” which allowed me to highlight that merely sitting in a classroom involved what Freud would call an enormous instinctual renunciation on their part. This renunciation came with benefits, but also costs, including costs kept outside of conscious awareness. How could psychoanalysis help them productively negotiate such internal conflicts—not to mention unavowed conflicts with me as their teacher? One kind of answer came from our second Freud reading, his 1908 essay on “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” which suggests that creative writing is one way to learn to oppose the inhibiting demands that society places on our pursuit of pleasure. Might their more academic writing serve a similar function?
To find out, my teacher’s assistant, Natalie Hardy, and I designed short paper assignments that asked students to illustrate key concepts from the readings by using examples from their own lives. One student examined how a logotherapeutic approach might have helped him deal with the depression he felt after an injury ended his career in high school athletics. Another insightfully interpreted one of her mother’s parapraxes as reflecting her unconscious sense of loneliness at her own departure for college. For another, Winnicott’s concept of the “destruction of the object” became a compelling way to describe how she had challenged her father as a teenager. In their final paper assignment, students chose an aspect of their life that they were interested in exploring—an event, a hobby, a relationship, etc.—doing so using both readings from the course and their own research.
Asking students to put their lives into their writing was, I recognized, a lot. For it to work, Natalie and I had to—much like therapists—earn their trust. We did so largely by empathic listening and demonstrating our interest in enhancing their free self-exploration. But we felt that we needed to do something more. How could the students trust us with their experiences if we weren’t willing to share something of ourselves? I was inspired, in this regard, by the ample psychoanalytic literature on analytic self-disclosure. As in clinical analysis, self-disclosure in pedagogy should be used sparingly, and only once a sufficient frame has been established to contain it and channel its dynamic, often unpredictable, energies.
I assigned an essay I wrote for Tablet, in which I discussed how my ethnographic research on a group of Catholic nuns helped me come to terms with the unexpected revelation, in my late twenties, that I had been neglected by my intellectually disabled mother. Natalie shared a course paper she had written that explored how disability had impacted her identity as an Armenian-American woman. We scheduled these readings for midway through the semester—after we had built up sufficient rapport, but still early enough to influence the final papers. It made us both excited and nervous to discuss them. But the students were engaged, asking us sensitive and insightful questions and expressing gratitude for these glimpses into our lives. Sharing our more personal writings helped unsettled the typical power structure of the classroom, giving students a degree of power to judge us and even provide insight into our own lives. One student pointed out that my essay had a very religious sensibility—a remark which shocked me as a lifelong atheist, yet also struck me as uncannily true. In short, self-disclosure provided a contained experience of Ferenczian “mutual analysis” that encouraged both students and instructors to a stronger engagement.
The benefits of this approach were evident in the papers themselves. Students wrote about topics that were extremely sensitive and intimate—the deaths of parents, involuntary hospitalizations, difficult relationships with siblings, experiences of racism, sexism, and familial abuse—and did so with insight, candor, and, on some occasions dark humor. But an even bigger affirmation of the course’s success came when I was named one of the two Ignite Instructors of the Year. The award was student-nominated, and reading the comments submitted on my behalf remains one of the most gratifying experiences of my career.
The bonds I formed with students in this course have endured, and matured, ever since. Several students went on to declare majors and minors in bioethics—a field that we did not address directly, but which allowed them to continue their work with me on psychoanalysis in a different context. Some have asked me for referrals to therapists in our local psychoanalytic community. And others have stopped by to chat about their academic and career goals, as well as matters from their personal lives. I am hopeful, and confident, that such wide-ranging conversations with students who take this course will continue in the years to come.
Works Cited
Frankl, Viktor. 2014. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1959. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming [1908].” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 9. Tr. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 141-154.
Freud, Sigmund. 1957. “Repression [1915].” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. Tr. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 141-158.
Ignatius of Loyola. 1900. The Autobiography of Saint Ignatius. Ed. J. F. X. O’Connor, S.J. New York: Benzinger Brothers.
Montás, Roosevelt. 2021. Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.