Addendum 

The response to this posting made me think of adding an addendum to it. It is about few things to consider if there is an intention to approach the local university about introducing psychoanalysis to its interested students. The addendum is not a set of advises but only mentioning things to consider.

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Approaching a university department to allow few lectures on psychoanalysis is better done through the local psychoanalytic institute or society rather that by individual initiatives. It makes it an organization addressing an organization.

The involved local psychoanalytic body should discuss and design an approach to the departments of psychology, sociology and social work (psychiatry !) and prepare:1. Individual lectures- at the beginning of the academic year as 'general knowledge'. 2. if there is interest in the subject the local psychoanalytic body should design and advertise a series of 3-5 lectures in certain topics to be offered in the different social and cultural activities in the allied departments (Dreams, transference, interpretation, etc.). 3. The involved analysts should make themselves available to the faculty in the concerned departments to help in post graduate theses, both with ideas, theoretical suggestions, and readiness to help with the literature. 
This last point demands from us some humility and desire to know more about certain areas that we actually know very little ( the emergence  of the sense of being in children and how it evolves.  It is an invitation to cooperation.  

Having a framework of cooperation and performing it without making the revival of psychoanalysis our ‘hidden’ purpose of approach could lead in a natural way to making psychoanalysis a valuable addition to the academic program that is accepting it as a guest or as a trial.

I am worried-though- about three things:

A. I expect good immediate response, which could make the analysts in such project to quickly think that students are future patients, and they start upholstering their couches. This will kill the project instantly. Our lectures in such a project should be about psychoanalysis, what it has discovered about us\them, and not about the neurotic cousins.  It is important not to let our present predicament colour our approach to introducing psychoanalysis to academia. We have to be aware that it will take few years to make it natural to be part of the curricula of those departments. Most importantly, moving toward academia is a step in the direction of changing psychoanalysis as it is learned and be trained now and finding a new and better psychoanalysis.  

B. Young and recently trained analysts did not learn psychoanalysis well because both they and their training faculty were interested in the contributions of the new schools. We have to agree or disagree about this point to decide what is  fundamental in the psychoanalysis we will introduce and avoid creating confusion about us. My view is that there is nothing psychoanalytic of any form in the new schools of psychoanalysis (since Kohut). The basic and foundational is the theory of psychodynamic is: the centrality of the working of the primary processes, interpretation, analysis of transference; NOT of relations, reconstruction that links the past with the present, revealing to the patient the presence of his childhood fixations in his present conflicts.  Those points could be the source of very interesting lecture to the public, and could show that psychoanalysis is about our daily life, and there is more to learn about it and more contribution it could offer other human sciences.

C. It is VERY important that the faculty in those department know that we are not there to compete with them, find new patients, belittle their specialties, etc. we are there to contribute in an educated way to their efforts.