Academy Introduction 

I will then introduce Dr. Peters who has graciously offered to share his ideas with us. It is my hope that, in the open discussion that follows, each person here will feel free to introduce whatever ideas, questions, and comments have emerged for you during the course of the evening’s presentations. As I see it, the paper we are about to hear is rich in its invitation (if not provocation) to revisit, question and reconsider ways of thinking that are so easily assumed to be unquestionable "facts". I hear from Dr. Peters that we are to expect "a few big bombs" and "numerous smaller hand grenades" to be found in his paper tonight. New ideas that do not conform to socially established versions of the "facts of life" are sometimes received as an attack upon the familiar, and upon cherished and preferred ways of thinking. When they are, representatives of the status quo sometimes ensure that such ideas "bomb", that is, fail, as a function of fear of differences. This response stands in contrast to the perspective that differences are valuable and essential elements of human creativity, intelligence, and self articulation. Nietzsche took the unshakable position that "there are no facts, only interpretations", and that absolutely everything is open not only to questioning, but is also subject to (if not the subject of) every individual’s unique interpretive perspective.

The Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts was formed in 1995 when a group of people began to question alarming trends that were appearing in the field of mental health. Certain social, political, economic and professional forces were converging that resulted in huge changes for psychology, psychiatry and social work which were once known as the "helping professions". These forces redefined the "helping professions" as something very different, namely the "health care professions". This different terminology relocates the "helping professions" squarely within the domain of medicine, its vocabulary, its metaphors of "sickness" and "health", and its very own brand of legal, ethical and professional regulations. While time does not here permit a fair elaboration of the forces which shaped these trends, it is important to note that they changed the conceptual framework, and its corresponding freedoms to make decisions about talking with, responding to, and otherwise working with people who wished to meet and talk about whatever might be troublesome in their lives. A health care context views what is, and is not to be happening in the consulting room as being subject to "management" by all kinds of pressures coming from outside the consulting room. This context does not view the reason to meet and talk with someone as being determined solely by an agreement made between the two people in the analytic discourse. To the degree that psychoanalysis is viewed as health care and subject to its premises, the reason to meet becomes determined by an evaluation of "medical emergency" made by a health care reimbursement company, based upon criteria listed in a diagnostic manual, in conformity with cost benefit considerations for that company.

This lack of distinction between psychoanalysis and medicine troubles Academy members. To my mind, it distorts the importance and complexity of Nietzshe’s notion of what it is to be "human, all too human" into a pathologizing process that serves to simplify and reduce the totality of the bodymindsoul person to an objectified, diagnosable, and thereby supposedly "fixable" set of parts. This reframing of a psychological framework for thinking about humanity into a medical framework, squeezes out essential personal and professional freedoms that are necessary for the realization of private, individual truths. In a health-care framework the meaning of what it is to be "human", and of how a life is supposed to be lived, is presumably "known". Understanding the how and the why of a life as it is BE-ing lived becomes replaced by prescriptions for that which has already been defined as "good" or "healthy" living standards. Filling that prescription is to involve completing an objectively drawn up plan for "treatment", (increasingly derived from standards published in treatment manuals), which standards are designed to change thought and behavior. In this picture all manner of human passions, desires, struggles, and differences become generalized and categorized into diagnoses which are treated as facts. This way of thinking about people makes use of pathology as the overarching metaphor or framework for understanding thoughts, emotions, images, wishes, and behaviors that are deemed unacceptable, framing the nonconformist and holding him or her hostage to a particular identity called "not norm-al" or "sick" with a mental version of "disease". Whatever the individual’s particular dis-ease might be, and how it has come to be so, are lost in the classification shuffle.

That which was seen in 1995 as an emerging trend has quite rapidly developed into a mandate for professionals to practice in a way that solidly complies with these established ways of thinking about people, which have become the status quo. In the new "mental health" environment, the exercising of one’s freedom to "re-think", as in to think for oneself, establishes itself as an exercise in disrupting the status quo. My reading of Nietzsche finds him suggesting that active revaluation of established ways of thinking serves to enhance creativity. The Academy has responded to ongoing changes in our profession not only by questioning them, but also by engaging itself in such a process of revaluation. Going beyond a statement of disagreement, the Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts advances a redefinition of psychoanalysis as art. An art which explores and articulates the private, subjective, and necessarily idiosyncratic truths of the individual - - truths which, according to Nietzsche, relate to our being "human, all too human", and which exist beyond "the good, the normal, the natural, and the healthy". Beginning with a very basic and fundamental re-interpretation of psychoanalytic thinking as "other than" healthcare, the study of psychoanalysis is viewed as a creative, intellectual discipline dedicated to the understanding (not the fixing or the changing) of the psyche. The practice of psychoanalysis is viewed as a mutual and collaborative inquiry entered into by two people for the purpose of furthering self understanding, and not for the purpose of defining experience as disease, disorder, or deficiency. The educational aspect of the Academy’s project is to develop, articulate, and present to our colleagues and to the public, our thinking about a psychoanalysis that resides outside the health care context, accompanied by a very different ethic and principles that embrace these fundamentally different values and beliefs about people. In developing educational programs that provide opportunities to study psychoanalysis as "other than" health care, we turn to the humanities to stretch and enrich our understanding of the diversity, multi dimensionality, intelligence, and creativity of human beings and the infinite variety of ways with which these can be expressed.

The ever-evolving trend to leave behind the pursuit of individual meanings in favor of a utilitarian focus on whatever is currently being defined as the greater good of the group, is very wide spread in this culture. According to John Ellis (1997), author of "Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities", the goal of "political correctness" has pervaded all of education in this country, including the teaching and the study of literature . For Ellis, the idea of knowledge for its own sake, with the freedom to talk together in a way that lets an argument go wherever its own logic leads, without fear or favor, is extraordinary and precious. Harold Bloom (1994) writes of literature and of the desire to write, that it "is not merely language; it is also the will to figuration, the motive for metaphor that Nietzsche once defined as the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere...in a time and place of one’s own, in an originality that must compound with inheritance". Might we consider a response to the question "what is psychoanalysis?" by trying on this idea? What if we were to picture the psychoanalytic discourse as something which holds open a space for the pursuit of the will to figuration, in the sense of a human desire to articulate, by locating in language, the shape, the figure, the ground, and the form of one’s own very individual, and uniquely different self? If, as Ellis says, "the content of a literary work is its unique stamp, the individual meaning that makes it unlike any other work" (p. 34), then would not the act of imposing preconceived ideas upon the unique stamp of a human being and his or her nature be . . . just as with a poem or a novel . . . akin to destroying the opportunity for discovering the poetry and the novelty of that person’s uniqueness?

Psychoanalytic process, as art, emerges from philosophical underpinnings that are quite different from those of medicine, and organizes itself in a manner that derives meaning from the subjective, internal world, and relies very heavily upon those aspects of our humanity called passion, desire, and a will to power, as the contextual surround for what emerges as the text of our lives. The Academy seeks to preserve the freedom to hold open a space for new and different ways of working with people who want to talk about the "human, all too human" nature of living in a world of their making. To rethink psychoanalysis in these various ways is to exercise the freedom to think, and to travel beyond existing parameters. Such travels inevitably open for questioning, some of the most fundamental assumptions of a culture (internal and otherwise) that participate in the setting of parameters – assumptions that are enshrined in that culture’s own philosophy, laws, and ethics. Nietzsche questioned some of the most basic assumptions and cherished beliefs of his times. This ethic and spirit of questioning, of thinking and rethinking about what we are doing and why, of considering the implications of what we do, and of opening ourselves to new ideas seen through the lens of diversity and difference, accompany the privileges, the empowerment, and the responsibilities involved in the freedom choose, and in the freedom to refuse. Nietzsche’s emphasis on the preservation of differences, and his insistence that there are "no facts, only interpretations" are as relevant today as they were a hundred years ago. And they are central to the Academy’s project of "re-thinking" psychoanalysis from outside the health care context - - as art - - as a creative, intellectual process dedicated to the under- standing of the psyche, in the pursuit of self knowledge, - - proceeding if you will, from a "will to empower" oneself to understand and to recognize the both fullness and the limits of one’s own human existence.

The Academy is fortunate to have the opportunity to sponsor this gathering tonight, in which we can engage in dialogue with one another, and with Dr. Fred Peters, who brings with him a rich background in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis . Dr. Peters' willingness to share his paper and his thinking offers us a chance to consider together the significance of the very idea of rethinking basic assumptions and cherished beliefs within the context of Nietzsche's work.