How Psychoanalysis Educates (Without Teaching)

I am not a psychoanalyst. When someone mentions an analyst these days, they are usually the butt of a joke — aloof, silent, more interested in obscure theories than in your actual life.

Beyond cartoons, we think of psychoanalysis (if we think of it at all) more as a form of therapy than a form of learning. At its best, we imagine a psychoanalyst relieving our anxiety or depression through empathic responses to our thoughts and feelings, or perhaps bringing conscious awareness to whatever we are unconsciously doing. At worst, we picture someone lying on a couch, talking, while someone else sits behind it, not talking. (The unlikeliness that this arrangement should be helpful to anyone is one reason why there are so many actual cartoons about it.)

But those of us who read and write what is known as psychoanalytic theory behold a richer vision, a wider world formed by the method and ideas originally developed by Freud, a vision deeply informed by what happens in our clinical practices, and vice versa. Through this mutual formation of theory and practice emerges a picture of psychoanalysis that is as much a kind of education as a kind of cure — the very education that makes us into human beings.

Becoming Human Together

Humans are not exactly full humans yet when we are born, but we are ready to become them. As I’ve explored with my colleagues Peter Goldberg and Michael Levin in our work on psychoanalysis and music, we are made more (or less) human by other humans — the people in our environment that facilitate our psychical development (or tragically fail to), inducting us as new members of the human world. (We believe the essential medium of this humanizing process to be music.)

This process begins, in psychoanalysis as in life, with what Peter has called induction: the ordinary activities of daily living that bring us into sync, into “common sense,” with the more established members of our cultural surroundings, who handle and care for us like ambassadors of this larger collective.

Many of these activities are about time, forming a reliable rhythm that we count on in order to develop into ourselves. Psychoanalysis provides a version of this rhythm, happening at the same time on the same days of the week for regular intervals until “we have to stop,” and the feeling of being held by this rhythm provides, like a drumbeat, the foundation for the process to become increasingly layered and complex over time.

Getting Interesting (and Interested)

But even when this goes very well — and especially when it doesn’t — this process has a distinct quality of seduction. Who is this person, a patient may start to wonder, who is so interested in the intimate details of my life? What do they want from me? Why am I bothered or tickled or just curious about that thing they said last time? And why did I have that weird dream?

To analyze means to break down, and when familiar ways of thinking about ourselves and our lives are disrupted by analytic work, we don’t know ahead of time what will come up, or what to make of what does. A desire forms to make sense of these new experiences, which in turn seduces us into becoming more curious about ourselves and our relationships.

Conductors of Attention

Disruption has the potential to fuel and animate personal growth, provided someone shows us how to be curious about what comes up, rather than merely afraid of it, which would tempt us to abandon the project altogether. Interestingness is like electricity; it powers our movement and desire, unless it fries the circuits altogether (the latter would be one psychoanalytic definition of trauma).

And so we need a form of conduction to regulate this voltage — to both channel and insulate us from stimulation, calibrated to whatever state we are in at the moment. An analyst, like a good parent or teacher or musician, is thus a kind of conductor, demonstrating a way to conduct ourselves, a form of conduct, that inspires us to find our own way of being in the world.

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When all this goes well enough, patients may find themselves increasingly able to make sense of things; to use common sense, sparked interests, and the reliability of ritual to improvise their own creative expression, their own translations of previously confusing or overstimulating experiences — converting one form of energy (psychophysical stimulation) into another (language or music or a dream, for example), which we could consider a form of transduction.

The best analysts and other caregivers are careful to leave enough room for this creative process to take root and grow, rather than forcing those in one’s care to adopt one’s own sense of things (which would be a kind of abduction).

The Education of Psychoanalysis

You might have noticed in this series a recurring theme of -ductions, which comes from the Latin for to lead, and is also the root of the word education. As you can probably tell, the kind of education formed by this series is not a simple delivery of information or advice but a rigorously open, collaborative, occasionally unsettling, and deeply harmonic accompaniment that draws upon collective tradition while reinventing itself each time anew.

And this education of the patient, in turn, informs the ongoing development of our technique and practice — the ongoing education of psychoanalysis.

None of this can be done perfectly, if done at all (there is a reason that Freud famously referred to psychoanalysis, alongside education and government, as an “impossible profession”). But perfection is not the goal; the goal, in fact, is not the goal.

The best outcome of a great education is that we get to keep on doing it, as opposed to stifling our curiosity because we are too threatened by what we don’t know about ourselves to follow it.

A Human Tradition, Still Unfolding

Psychoanalysis has never been and is still not available to everyone, and those of us who have had access to psychoanalytic treatment at fees we could afford when we needed or wanted it are fortunate. Yet the world of psychoanalytic ideas is there for the taking. I am trained as a psychologist and therapist, but have not completed one of the programs traditionally associated with the education of psychoanalysts — the formal analytic training provided by psychoanalytic institutes (though I teach and participate actively at some of them).

But there is nothing inherently institutional about psychoanalysis. There is also a reason that Freud’s ideas about being human have become seamlessly woven into the fabric of our humanities, from the last novel you read to the podcast you just heard to the next show that you stream: They make intuitive sense at a human level.

And the sense they make is often physically palpable, which is probably one reason why psychoanalysis came to be known as a form of medicine — a therapeutic release from being tied up in knots, the freedom to be less at odds with ourselves and the world around us. Freer to be ourselves, which makes us more humane toward others, more human.

This is what an education does. And even if we are not suffering from mental illness, or don’t think of our inner lives in those terms; whether we are analysts or patients or both or neither; we live together in a world shaped by, and still shaping, a psychoanalytic education in human being — an education that is always learning from itself, freeing us up to find the world, as long as someone points the way.