A Moment of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Academia

This post is based on a personal experience, so it does not have an absolute value but only what is relative to my limitations.

In 1962 I was teaching psychology at Ein-Shams University (Heliopolis University) in Cairo. In the first year the course in general phycology was introducing two main points of view: Cognitive functions (memory, thinking, perception, etc., are psychological processes, and they are subject to experimental work to guarantee their scientific nature). In the second year of psychology, I was teaching Freud's "Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis". The students of the first year were fascinated by the effects of some unconscious elements on the common psychological processes. I just asked them to waite till they were in second year to know what the unconscious means.

The students of the second year (who were instructed by a great professor in the first year but not analytically minded) were fully absorbed in the part on dreams.  By the end of teaching that part I was faced with a group question: do wishes create, stimulate, shape, etc., dreams or do dreams call wishes from the unconscious to happen or is it the wish the master of sleep? In 1962 I was as fascinated by psychoanalyses as those smart kids were.

A few years later I was able to get better in understanding the unconscious process and discard the notion of repression. I was first leaning towards the role of other defense mechanisms in creating variety of unconscious conditions. That venture made me realize that psychoanalytic terminologies and vocabulary are not emanating from a theory of psychoanalysis, and they are merely expressions of certain observation. Yet, the unconscious no longer was a noun or an adjective but a new mystery to solve. Freud’s paper on the three categories of unconsciousness was a very new way to approach psychoanalysis. The most amazing thing about the unconscious, which made Freud’s endeavours worthy of its place in human heritage, is link betweenen thinking and language and Speech.

It just happened that Egypt and The Soviet Union  (Russia) were close to each other at that time and there was good cultural exchangesetween the. We were able to read in English the freat works of Marks an listen to the fantastic Moscow Orchestra with very little expense. To me the works of Lauria and Vigotsky (and two other female psychologists) were even better than the great Cassirer and Lang). ALL THOSE THINKERS, PHILOSOPHERS, PSYCHOLOGISTS were exploring the missed point that psychoanalysts were almost considering irrelevant: speaking our thoughts is unconscious and we unconsciously speak without consciously using a language. In other terms when we talk we unconsciously reveal our inner life ‘unconscioulty’.My answer to my student at that time was just listen carefully and you will notice that what is said is two lines of thoughtsare intermingled [dreams and slips of the tong is a language].  

This notion stayed with me all those years and opend my mind to many things pertaing to the nature of psychoanalysis. In a moment of insight that lasted for close to four decades I cam to believe that psychoanalysis as method psychotherapy is no longer convincing, while pschanalysis as epistemology is the right definition of its core. Therefore limiting psychoanalysi to an apprenticeship in psychotherapy has no place in Academia, but as an epistemology and a branch of the human sciences academia is it natural home and it is time to give it that chance.