Dual Training: Professional and Personal Insights
Peter Loewenberg, UCLA and the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute
Psychoanalysis is, among other things: 1) a therapy; 2) a humane 21st-century world view which bears both the tolerance of Enlightenment secularism and the Romantic assertion of human individuality; 3) an investigative research method; and 4) a mode of perceiving human interactions, data, events, and behaviors. The first category, the clinical therapeutic encounter between analysand and an analyst, is experientially necessary to understand and to make full use of the remaining three categories.
The critical difference between those who use only theory and those who have a thorough familiarity with a hands-on clinical situation is that the psychoanalyst uses his subjective self empathically to know the "other" in the emotional field they jointly occupy. This field may be the chaos of a research project or the inner pain of an analysand. The natural syncretism between the research and the interpretive tasks of the historian and psychoanalyst is that both construct complex narrative explanations with hierarchies or orders of "causes." These reach from the common-sense rational to the less understood, sometimes intuited, emotional, unconscious, even irrational motives. Perceiving, framing, and tackling a historical problem is similar to working with a patient and that patient's life. The tool of cognition is the self -- the emotional insight and sensibility of the researcher. An institutional benefit for academics of informal psychoanalytic training is the potential of creating joint psychoanalytic-academic seminars, of placing graduate students in private low-fee analyses or psychoanalytic clinic analyses, and of being able to draw on and instrumentalize their own clinical experience.
The downside of dual training is the substantial commitment of time and energy necessary to acquire an entirely new, or even to create a unique hybrid, profession. The academic must undergo an apprenticeship and process of socialization; learn literature, bibliography and nosology; and acquire the novel and idiosyncratic thoughtstyle and the esoteric coded language of a new discipline. A demanding program of training draws on the same intellectual and emotional resources that go toward research and publication, so that research "productivity" is initially delayed. The demonstrated promise of psychoanalytic understanding applied to any other field becomes more and more valuable, perhaps necessary, as the scholar is willing to draw more on the subjective and make greater use of creative imagination.
To the extent that the historian uses psychoanalysis, it allows him to more effectively move back and forth across the internal boundaries between conscious, preconscious, and unconscious processes. The barriers will become more permeable, easing insight to relationships between discrete, apparently incoherent, categories, data, and feelings. There is a good reason why psychoanalysis is so ubiquitous among writers, artists, actors, and those in the world of literature, film, and theater. These craftsmen of language, image, and symbol welcome the tools of psychoanalysis as they develop their internal and most private resources. Any ambitious institution must weigh the quality and originality of work as well as its quantity. We wish to have not only publication, but discerning original publication. An institution's very integrity depends upon a willingness to acknowledge the unique value of the very recent availability of full interdisciplinary training, including clinical training in psychoanalysis, whatever the costs in time and immediate publication.
Some critics express the fear that acquiring clinical skills will seduce the scholar to give up teaching and writing and lose his academic identity. This has not been our experience in California where we have trained over 30 university social scientists and humanists in clinical psychoanalysis. Many of them are members of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic-Consortium. The isolation of solo clinical practice and the feuding of the psychoanalytic institutional community are not that alluring! The cases which I know of where researchers became full-time clinicians are those where an academic career was not an option. An identity as a university teacher and researcher is a precious, hard-fought achievement not lightly to be thrown away. The opportunity to have and to train students, to experience that at the end of a semester they know things they would not have otherwise, is a rare satisfaction only to be compared with the experience of working with a person therapeutically and helping him to turn his life around.
The creation of discrete academic disciplines is historical, their boundaries are arbitrary. In the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophy freed herself from theology. In the 19th century, history as a discipline liberated herself from philosophy. Political science, sociology, and anthropology are essentially 20th-century creations. Artificial disciplinary boundaries have quickly become institutionalized and rigid, each with its discrete subculture and guild. But neither the human mind nor the real world are so compartmentalized. Knowledge, understanding, and problem-solving do not lend themselves to narrow scotomized approaches. Fields such as history and psychoanalysis must be related to each other by the researcher, not statically, but as independent variables, each with its own context and imperatives. Creativity requires open listening. It draws on the perspectives and findings of many disciplines as it demands their integral and interpretive use.
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