In an unusually pessimistic essay, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” published in 1939 (the year of his death), Freud called psychoanalysis one of the three “impossible professions,” along with education and government. “One can be sure beforehand,” Freud ruefully confesses, “of achieving unsatisfying results” (1964, 248). My own experience with psychoanalytic education, however, has been far more satisfying. Indeed, for over 50 years at the University of Albany, I’ve made the writing of psychoanalytic diaries and personal essays a highly successful keystone in my undergraduate teaching.
In the mid-1970s, I created the first course on literature and psychoanalysis in our English department. Its central feature was the weekly psychoanalytic diary entries in which students wrote about their dreams—the “royal road to the unconscious,” as Freud puts it (1953, 5: 608)—fantasies, and psychological conflicts. Students could be as personal as they wished in their diaries; no subject was off limits. I didn’t grade the diaries, but they were a fundamental requirement. Before returning the diaries the following week, I would read a few entries out loud, always anonymously and with no discussion—always honoring requests from students who didn’t want their diary entries read aloud. At the beginning of the semester, I got many such requests. But by the end of the semester almost all of them gave permission.
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