Introductory Remarks, ‘Act and Transmission: on Formation in Psychoanalysis’, 20th
October 2011.
Simon Critchley
I am delighted to be able to welcome you to the New School for Social Research (NSSR) for
what promises to be a truly important conference on ‘Act and Transmission: Of Formation in
Psychoanalysis’ and I’d particularly like to thank Paola Mieli, David Lichtenstein and Mark
Stafford for all their hard work in making this event happen. I have set myself a modest but
nonetheless difficult task in these brief remarks to say something about the place of
psychoanalysis in the history and the present of the NSSR.
In 1919, Freud made a suggestive remark that psychoanalysis could occupy a unique place in the
relation between medical science, on the one hand, and philosophy and the arts, on the other,
what he intriguingly called a universitas literarum, a full or complete university (Volluniversität)
that offered the hope and the possibility for a reunification of the various spheres of knowledge
that had been separated in modernity, and fractured into the various faculties. The NSSR was
also founded in 1919, the ‘new school’ in downtown Manhattan as opposed to the ‘old school’ of
Columbia University uptown. It was founded to be a progressive, radical and interdisciplinary
haven - a kind of refuge for people frustrated and disappointed by traditional institutions. It is
important to remember that the NSSR was not and is not a university in any classical
Humboldtian sense, tied to the state, where professors are bureaucrats, and whose purpose is the
production and reproduction of knowledge. The NSSR is and never was the kind of infernal
machine that Lacan had in mind when he talked about the ‘the discourse of the university’. This
is a small, left-wing, private and most importantly, poor educational institution with a powerful
sense of its identity and its history.
Psychoanalysis has had a place at the NSSR almost since the beginning and I wanted to relate a
number of facts about who has taught here and what they have taught as it might give you more
of a sense of where you are sitting right now. With the help of my assistant, Todd Kesselman, I
did some research in the archives. The story begins in 1926, when Sandor Ferenczi offered a
course on psychoanalysis intended, in his words, ‘To meet the requirements of the intelligent
layman’. This was part of an initiative to have courses that offered the most contemporary
expressions of psychology, literature, and the arts, which in turn was an attempt to make the
NSSR the home of a new intellectual modernism. Ferenczi’s 1926 course was called ‘Selected
Chapters in the History of Psychoanalysis’ and he spent 4 months in New York. From his
correspondence with Freud in this period, we know that he lectured, saw patients, and was
involved in key issues in the development of psychoanalysis and training in the United States.
Alfred Adler was also teaching at the NSSR in 1927-28 and gave introductory courses on
individual psychology and parent-child relations. Adler, the father of the celebrated Inferiority
Complex, gave a course on Individual Psychology which comprised some twenty-four lectures,
including sessions on ‘The Superiority Complex’, ‘The Style of Life’ and ‘Love and Marriage’.
Variations of this lecture course were given in 1929 and 1932-33.
In 1927 Fritz Wittels, a student of Freud’s and a collaborator of Karl Krauss, the famous
Austrian satirist, was invited by NSSR’s founding president, Alvin Johnson, to give lectures that
supplemented the standard course offerings. In 1928-29, Wittels gave eighteen lectures on the
‘Principles of Psychoanalysis’ and he taught lecture courses until at least 1940 including an
intriguing course called ‘Phantom Psychology’.
Karen Horney left Chicago in 1934 and was invited to become a member of the faculty at the
NSSR in 1935. She maintained a relationship with the NSSR until her death in 1952. Thanks to
the NSSR archivist, I found a series of course catalogue entries for Horney. These courses were
usually co-taught, often with Max Wertheimer, founder of the Gestalt School of Psychology, and
the important sociologists Hans Speier and Albert Salomon. In 1940 she gave a course on
‘Power, Domination and Freedom’ and in 1942 a course on ‘Problems of Value’; indeed, on the
same page of the course catalogue are listed courses with Leo Strauss, who taught here for many
years, and Thorstein Veblen, the radial economist. Amusingly, sometimes the price of these
courses is listed: in 1939, Horney’s ‘Types of Personality’ cost $8.50, which was the same price
as a course on ‘Self-Analysis’ in 1942. Self-analysis is always pretty good value for money! By
contrast, the ‘Case Seminar on the Structure of Personality and Culture’ from 1941-42 cost $20.
The latter seminar was co-taught with Erich Fromm, who taught at the NSSR for many years,
indeed into the 1950s. It was announced on April 5, 1957, that Erich Fromm would open his
lecture series on the ‘Origins and Future of Psychoanalysis’ by addressing the theme: ‘Freud, the
Man, and His Motivations’ and the catalogue description talks about Fromm’s approach in terms
of ‘humanistic or existentialist psychoanalysis’.
Another psychoanalyst teaching at the NSSR in the early years was Wilhelm Reich, well before
his psychotic break and the invention of the now infamous ‘Orgone Accumulators’. Reich left
for New York in August 1939 from the Stavanger Fjord, on the last boat to leave Norway for the
USA before the war began on September 3. He began teaching at The New School, where he
remained for two years, living in Queens. His house had a basement that he used for animal
experiments. He died in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania in 1957.
During the years of the Second World War, Ernst Kris – Lacan’s rival and uncanny mirrordouble in many ways – taught at the NSSR. I have a full file of courses offered by Kris from
1940-43; the courses are incredibly wide-ranging and interesting. They include a number of
seminars on ‘National Socialist Propaganda’ ($20), ‘Problems in the Social Psychology of Art’
($20), ‘Art and Society’ ($15), whereas a 15 week course on ‘Freud’s Work in Perspective’ is a
mere $12.50! In 1943, Kris became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and
began his long collaboration with Heinz Hartmann and Rudolph Loewenstein, Lacan’s former
analyst, where they developed ego psychology. Lacan’s polemics against ego psychology are
obviously charged with a real transferential passion and directed against a specific place: New
York City.
With regard to Lacan’s formation, it might be interesting for you to know that, in 1941, after
both Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson had been stripped of their French citizenship,
they emigrated to New York City and joined the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes from 1942-1946,
which was hosted by the NSSR. So, this is therefore the place where Jakobson and Levi-Strauss
met and first collaborated. Alexandre Koyré and Jacques Maritain were also teaching at NSSR in
this period.
I could carry on, but time is short. My point is that this institution, the NSSR, is deeply bound up
with the history of psychoanalysis, indeed the pre-history of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Moving rapidly towards the present, between 1992 and 1999, at the instigation of Michael
Adams, a New School administrator and Jungian analyst, and with the support of my esteemed
colleague Richard J. Bernstein, a Masters’ Program in Psychoanalytic Studies was established.
Some of the courses were taught by Alan Bass, who still teaches psychoanalytic theory
brilliantly to large groups of students in the Philosophy Department at NSSR. Other important
teachers were Joel Whitebook, James Miller, Jessica Benjamin and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl,
who completed her PhD at the NSSR under Hannah Arendt. I think Paola Mieli also taught at
NSSR during this period. During those years, Slavoj Zizek and Renata Salecl were frequent
visitors and taught courses at the NSSR. This program was unfortunately closed due to poor
student enrollment.
Some years later, in 2004, just as I arrived at the NSSR from England, the Philosophy
Department began what is called a ‘Concentration in Psychoanalysis’, with courses taught
primarily by Alan Bass, but also by Julia Kristeva, Marcia Cavell, Jay Bernstein and myself. It is
also worth pointing out that Jacques Derrida was a visiting professor at the NSSR during the
1990s until shortly before his death, teaching courses every year, often with a psychoanalytic
orientation. Indeed, at the present moment, a number of us, led by Jeremy Safran from the
Psychology Department, are trying to establish an interdisciplinary program in psychoanalytic
studies. We will see if we are successful.
In conclusion, allow me a personal and polemical word. It’s personal because my wife is a
psychoanalyst whose polémoi with psychoanalytic institutions fill a good deal of our bedtime
discussions. In my view, psychoanalysis is not dying, but it risks being suffocated by the
institutions who allegedly operate in its name. These institutions risk turning psychoanalysis into
a kind of mausoleum, of reifying psychoanalysis and deifying its founding heroes, whoever they
might be. Psychoanalytic institutions are founded upon ancient factional and fratricidal (and
occasionally sororicidal – think of Anna Freud versus Melanie Klein) battles whose significance
fewer and fewer people - particularly young people - either understand or care about. This
situation strikes me as deeply unfortunate. It is the transmission of psychoanalysis to the next
generation that is the single most important task that faces you.
Yet, it seems to me that the liveliest moments in the history of psychoanalysis, from the time of
the Freud-Adler-Jung controversies onwards, have been its crises, particularly its institutional
crises. One of the most interesting features of Lacanian psychoanalysis was its extraordinarily
fecund emergence in the battles within the French societies (SPP and SFP) in the 1950s and the
excommunication of Lacan in 1964 and the establishment of Ecole Freudienne de Paris in 1964.
In that spirit, what we perhaps should be wishing for, I think, is institutional questioning crisis,
because crises and even polémoi are at least signs of life and the mothers of invention. This is
where I’d like to congratulate the Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association, and particularly Paola
Mieli, for the initiative to call this conference on the question of the training or formation of the
analyst and for raising the question of the transmission of psychoanalysis. Questions of
formation and transmission are, of course, questions about the nature of the institution and the
possibility or, more strongly, the wish that psychoanalysis might have a future (the question of
the institution is the question about the possibility of the future). Lacan was right: what has to be
transmitted in psychoanalysis is not knowledge, it is not a science; it is a teaching, a training, but
ultimately an act that is related to the life of desire. I hope that what I have said about the history
of the NSSR, as a kind of intellectual refuge that is not a university nor a training institute, is
able to help you think fundamentally and radically about that life of desire and its institutional
framing. I hope you enjoy a genuinely crisis-ridden and critical few days’ work.
As a non-psychoanalyst - a humble philosopher - let me finish by saying something rude: the
future of psychoanalysis, its persistent, implacable and passionate truth, is simply too important
to be left to psychoanalytic institutions, nor should it assimilated within the protocols and
bureaucratic regime of the university. Something new is required, something worthy of the name
of the universitas literarum of which Freud spoke, something at once less hierarchical and more
informal, less paternalistic and more anarchic, something finally more full of life. I wish you bon
courage!