Transference, Countertransference, and Search Committees

My most recent stint serving on a search committee has coincided with teaching a class on Freud. The intersections have been instructive.

There is a strange collision that happens as the fantasies and desires of the search committee members are projected onto each of the candidates in turn and find, or fail to find, some reflection or connection.

Oddly, it seems to me that the candidate plays the role of therapist to the committee rather than vice versa. The successful candidate is the one who best manages the transference of the committee members as well as their own countertransference onto the department and the imagined job. Wishful thinking runs rampant at every turn. This includes the projection of fears which are no less reliant on fantasy than are the projections of hope.

Mirror Stage

I must remember this photo the next time I teach Lacan's "Mirror Stage."

Freud Lives

In a previous post, I recounted the sad tale of opposition to a course I had proposed on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. I predicted eventual success despite this opposition, but that it would require many hours of tedious and contentious committee meetings. This turned out to be the case.

After wending its way through the program faculty, the advisory board, the curriculum subcommittee, the college council, and finally the university policy committee, I am pleased to announce that there is now a course on Freud at my institution. By a single vote, my colleagues decided that perhaps there was still some reason to teach Freud – despite assertions that his theories have been discredited, that his ideas may harm vulnerable students, and that lawsuits against the university would be imminent. It was a sad, frustrating and time consuming series of debates, but at least it is over now.

The process has taken its toll on my enthusiasm, and left yet another bad taste in my mouth concerning campus politics. However, I will strive to enjoy the new course. There are a surprising number of students who seem to be very excited about the class already. I find this charming and I imagine their enthusiasm will soon rekindle my own.

Warhol's Freud

FML

Here is the reaction from my colleagues in the psychology department to a proposed undergraduate general education course on Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams:

We would be concerned if students had an academic experience at [our University] that endorsed psychoanalysis as a viable approach to personality and the meaning of dreams in an era where psychological inquiry has for decades relied on scientific methods that have dismissed psychoanalysis along with phrenology, astrology and other invalid explanations of human behavior.

Salvidor Dali's 1939 sketch of Freud.

It's not that the psychology department itself has any interest in teaching courses on Freud. This we knew already. However, the fact that they wish to prevent any "academic experience" of Freud by students anywhere at our university is new.

I don't believe these objections will prevent the course from being offered, but it will consume the time and energy of many people around campus. This is the level of intellectual debate that occupies much of my time as an academic. Some days it strikes me as comic. Other days, it just makes me sad.

Perhaps the next course I propose will be "Psychoanalysis, Phrenology and Astrology." That should make for some entertaining committee meetings at the very least.

Orgone Summer Camp

Here's something very odd. It is a sort of summer camp at Orgonon, home of the Wilhelm Reich Museum and Orgone Energy Observatory in Rangeley, Maine. In addition to rental cabins and the occassional conference on orgonomy and the ongoing influence of Wilhelm Reich, it also hosts Sunday afternoon summer workshops on "mushrooming" and "small woodland animals." Along with orgone accumulators, cloudbusters, and hiking and swimming too, it's like a strange little rustic Disney World for slightly kinky academics.

I confess a morbid fascination with Reich. He's an odd combination of radical social theorist, heterodox psychoanalyst, and scientific crank -- all things I adore. Reading Reich can be a little like reading Freud, Schreber and Lyndon LaRouche all rolled into one. And reading about Reich gives an added thrill of conspiracy theory and political intrigue thrown in for good measure with his unlikely death in a federal prison, the FBI investigation into his communist ties, and the bizarre FDA decision to burn his books.

I lived in Maine for a short time and I fear I missed my chance to visit this wonderfully strange and off-the-beaten track cultural shrine. I think I would have enjoyed Reich's beautiful woodland home and laboratory far, far too much.