Invisible in academic psychology
An article in today's New York Times an article about the disappearance of Freud in academic psychology set me to musing a bit. To Jungians being ignored by psychology, especially in the US, is old news. But until the last 25 years or so, psychoanalysis still had a place at the table in many if not most departments of psychology.
Alice Eagly, the chairwoman of the psychology department at Northwestern University, explained why: Psychoanalysis is “not the mainstream anymore” and so “we give it less weight.”
The primary reason it became marginalized, Ms. Eagly, said, is that while most disciplines in psychology began putting greater emphasis on testing the validity of their approaches scientifically, “psychoanalysts haven’t developed the same evidence-based grounding.” As a result, most psychology departments don’t pay as much attention to psychoanalysis.
Because you know, it is ever so important for what is being taught to be the latest and greatest thing. But what about expecting psychology students to have a sense of the history of the field? Why shouldn't clinicians be expected to know how the firld developed, how we got from Mesmer to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? How can they develop a critical eye for the next shiny new thing if they do not have well developed understanding of what went before?
I was an undergraduate 40 years ago -- good grief, my 40th reunion is next spring! -- and even then Jung was mentioned only in passing along with Adler and others from the early days of psychoanalysis. But we did learn the rudiments of psychoanalytic theory. Even then, though, changes were afoot. And when I was in clinical psych. graduate school, Freud was a minor player of historical interest but not seen as of clinical importance. Jung wasn't mentioned at all.
Freud had room in the academy in psychology on the coasts, but not so much in the center of the country. I remember the term "boot strap empiricism" being applied to the behavioral approaches already coming from the Midwest. I wonder if Freud ever had a solid place outside of major centers like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles? And Jung? Never had a home in the US in psychology. Look for Jung in the religion department or comparative literature or mythology.
It does worry me that a significant body of knowledge is being lost. The therapeutic frame is important no matter what kind of therapy is practiced. Being able to look at one's own reactions and understand them in relation to a patient is important. The inferiority complex which seems to have gripped psychology, making it seem imperative to be more scientific than any of the hard sciences surely deserves interpretation? So maybe for now, it is the salvation of the depth psychologies that we have retreated to these other departments so we can allow psychology to work through its issues. Because I cannot believe that the insights of Jung and Freud and those who followed them, insights which have informed psychotherapy for 100 years and which today inform us about characters in literature, film and history, will disappear just because psychology needs to be "scientific".
