I am wondering if anyone could give me any insight on colleges or universities that either host or are accepting of psychoanalytical topics in psychology? I have a great interest in Carl Jung and his works, and have a specifically passionate interest in the psychology of dreams, and have written on the topic myself for several years outside of college. I have had a pretty hard time, however, finding colleges that have courses or programs that entertain the study of such topics, and instead only have found programs centering around more applied and practical practices such as neuroscience and psychiatry, save for a few mentions here and there during lectures and the sort.
Any information and insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
@juillet is a good person to ask about psychology generally.
My understanding is that what you want is more likely to be at a grad level in the US.
Is studying overseas an option at all? What are your academic stats and budget limitations? Would you be happy studying only psychology without gen Ed’s and opportunities to change?
Thanks Conformist1688! @Mythwalker, psychology is my field (I got my PhD in it). I have two main thoughts in response to your question.
In general, undergraduate majors are about breadth and not depth. As Conformist mentioned, depth and specialization is something that you pursue in graduate school. At the undergrad level, you will certainly learn about Carl Jung and his work and its influence on the field of psychology (as you probably realize, Jung had a pretty big influence on psychology). But you will mostly learn about him in your introductory psychology class and then maybe some other psychology electives where his work pops up (like if you take a class on sleep if your college offers it; he popped up in my Theories and Techniques of Counseling class when we learned about psychoanalysis; he will probably come up in an abnormal psychology course; etc.) There’s really no opportunity to specialize in Jungian techniques or analysis - with good reason; you need a foundational grounding across psychology before you can begin to dig deep.
You should know up front that in general, modern psychology has an…interesting…relationship with psychoanalysis. Speaking very generally - much of the work that Carl Jung (and Freud, his sort-of mentor) did wasn’t scientific by the modern standards of the field, and most modern psychologists view it as a germination of modern psychology but not super relevant to work of most modern psychologists. You’ll find that most clinical psychologists don’t actually practice psychoanalysis, and even the ones who do seldom conduct it the way that Jung and Freud developed it. And you’ll also find that while their work is referenced in a historical sense, their theories and tenets aren’t really the basis for most modern psychological theory, with the exception of a few (extraversion and introversion were two of his biggest contributions to modern psychology, although they’re not really interpreted the way that he interpreted them in his time. Individuation is also studied, but again, in a different light.
The psychology of sleep and dreams has almost no modern influence from Jung - frankly, his thoughts on these topics don’t reflect the scientific work that’s been done. Probably the only thing that’s endured is his idea that dreams are essentially the way that help people make sense of their lives - the brain’s way of processing and categorizing the things that happen while you’re awake (and even that is not precisely what he said).
Honestly, if you are deeply interested in the symbolism of psychoanalytic theory, you might find philosophy a better home than psychology - as I understand it, philosophers still discuss Jung’s work (and Freud’s) far more often than psychologists do in a modern sense.
I was going to pipe up in a much less elegant way from @juillet and say that basically among serious academic psych departments, psychoanalysis is dead, mainly because it hasn’t stood up to the rigors of science.
a student interested in Jungian psychology may find programs that allow for more flexibility to be preferable-- eg. Hampshire, Antioch, Goddard. Course in philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies would blend well with psychology.
While this may not be true of every school, you may have some luck with finding Jung-adjacent courses in the English department. Based off my high school experience, Jung’s Ideas were 15 minutes of my AP psychology class and a semester of my “psychological realism” English elective.
I don’t have any knowledge of a college that has an English department with similar courses, but that’s a place to look in your search.
You might find the most concentrated source of study in psychoanalysis at a post-graduate training center. This would be after you get your Ph.D. Here are some examples:
I agree that your undergraduate years are the time to get a broad based education in your major – it is not the time to specialize. If you want to seek out an opportunity to learn more in a specific area of interest you can see if the college you choose offers any opportunities for an independent study class, an honors thesis or something along those lines (although you would have to find a professor willing to be your advisor on that topic). You can also find most college’s course catalogs online and can see what classes the school offers.
My husband is a psychodynamically oriented clinical psychologist.
And every psychologist my husband or I have ever gone to has used psychodynamic approaches and discussed our dreams, etc., so I disagree with @juillet that it is irrelevant. Although we looked for that approach because we believe in it, we had no problem finding a choice of people who practice it. We live in the New York area, though, so there are a lot of Jews, and many of the great masters of psychoanalysis were Jewish.
My husband went to Vassar for undergrad and Ferkauf at Yeshiva for his doctorate. He loved both.
You may study Jung in college, but your psychoanalytic training will come after the doctoral level of study.
Probably the best college for undergraduate work in psychology is Clark University, the only college where Freud lectured when he came to the United States. Jung lectured there, too! It has an outstanding reputation among psychologists whose work is informed by the psychoanalytic tradition.
(Don’t go to Williams! I love the college and my son has chosen to attend it, but he is unlikely to major in psych. The catalog reveals that there are no classes on Personality there anymore, and to find coursework on psychoanalytic theories, you have to look in other departments like English! What you and juillet said about the primacy of neuroscience and “scientific” experimentation-oriented approaches is quite true at Williams, and I am sure you and juillet are right that it is true of many colleges.)
It is of course true that there are many psychologists that use a psychodynamic approach - so anyone who wanted to find a lot of psychologists who practice psychodynamics could certainly do so, especially in a very large city. If OP wanted to become a psychologist and who takes a psychodynamic approach in their clinical practice, they could also certainly find clients and have a thriving career.
It is still true, though, that most psychologists do not take a psychodynamic approach to their clinical practice, and that modern psychodynamics is quite different from the psychoanalytic methods that Freud and Jung developed - it’s evolved and changed over time as psychologists have done more research to improve its effectiveness. (That’s true of any approach to clinical practice, though - CBT, humanistic, and family systems too.) I say this only because if OP is reading classical Jung and thinking they’ll find that treated in depth in their undergrad in psychology courses, I don’t want them to be disappointed. Most psychology departments will disappoint them on that level.
Probably the most important point that TheGreyKing makes is the attitude of most psychology departments towards Freud and Jung. That’s what I was getting at when I made my comments - most psychology departments have at best a cautious attitude towards psychoanalysis and at worst a sort of disdain. So while you may learn about them in your intro and your history of systems class (if your department even offers one), it’s not going to be in the most positive light necessarily.
And here is an old NYT article about the presence of psychoanalysis in the humanities and the near absence of it in psychology departments. The article is old, but from my personal experience, it’s relatively accurate in terms of its description of how psychology departments treat psychoanalysis: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25cohen.html
As an additional note - while I normally advise students to choose their college holistically, I will also add to TheGreyKing’s astute observation about Williams. Most small colleges only have a few faculty in their psychology department (relative to really large research universities - Williams actually probably has more than most), and most small colleges do not hire adjuncts frequently. So at small colleges, the classes offered and the theoretical approach taken to the field are going to be really dependent on the full-time faculty who teach and do research there. Some LACs take the approach of trying to diversify their faculty’s interest and offer a breadth of courses; other LACs take the approach of developing a cluster of knowledge depth in a few areas. Browsing through the course catalog in departments of interest is always a good idea.
This makes sense to me. I was a psychology major back in the late 1970s to 1980s. At every college, psychology was considered a social science. For non-majors, a psychology class fulfilled a social science distribution requirement. When touring colleges with my children, I noticed that psychology is no longer considered a social science! I remember taking classes in all the major areas of psychology: social, cognitive, personality, developmental, abnormal (they don’t call it that any more – now I think they call it psychopathology), experimental, psychopharmacology, biopsychology (now it’s part of neuroscience). I didn’t take – but the department offered – classed in applied areas such as organizational psych, educational psych, sports psych, forensic psych,
Well, I’m sure that many people use psychoanalysis in their practices. That doesn’t make it scientifically valid or even effective. Lots of people use horoscopes and swear by them too. “it worked for me today.” “Gee it was so accurate.” Except that they’re not taking into account all kinds of things that make X seem valid but really isn’t, like maybe doing ANYTHING will produce results. You know, changing a tire with someone – that cured his/her depression! There’s nothing magical about laying on a couch a la Freud–or if there is, let’s see the evidence. That doesn’t mean that Freud didn’t contribute to the field, and contribute a lot. It’s that the field has gone way beyond those contributions. It’s used Freud’s contributions and has moved forward. Also what seems to be true, isn’t necessarily true. Hence: science. And the articles are right: for many of his ideas and practices to be taken seriously, well get on top of that research, folks. Prove it. I call a little (or a lot) of B.S. at the end of the article that some things can’t be measured therefore we should just give Freudian dogma a pass. No way.
Lots of people do all kinds of things that “work for them” (touch magical water when entering a sacred building, say special chants on certain days of the week, tap the base with a baseball bat three times to be sure to not strike out, wear a special hat to ensure a favorite team wins) but that doesn’t make it valid. That’s why there’s science to see if what seems to work actually is effective. Otherwise it’s mumbo-jumbo, sceances, magical thinking, and crystal ball reading. Seriously.
There will be a “swing back to Freud” – well there’re swings back to the horoscope all the time. So I guess that’s possible. But science, and effectiveness, isn’t a popularity contest.
I personally take offense to the comparison of psychodynamic therapy to horoscopes.
I also find attempts to explain human behavior as a science to be trying to force scientific models into situations where they don’t really work. A psychological diagnosis is a shorthand for a combination of symptoms more often than it is “objective” in any true sense. Downs syndrome has a clear scientific cause, not just a correlation. Most behavioral problems do not.
Behavior is complex and multi-determined. It is seldom a situation in which a single factor A causes a single behavior B. Trying to pretend it is so has led to the overprescription of and overreliance on drugs that sometimes cause additional problems, without really helping people attain the insights into their own behaviors, and the strategies to address them, that allow for real change.
Almost anyone can benefit from trying to understand why they interpret and respond to interactions the way they do. That is what psychodynamic therapy is all about. If you want to call it a philosophical approach instead of a hard science, I actually agree. But don’t belittle it.
I also believe in the value to humankind and to individuals of the study of philosophy, history, classics, literature, etc., and I do not elevate the hard sciences, such as chemistry and biology, above the humanities.
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(But as I am having a rough week— my mother returned to the hospital today in a life-threatening situation with blood clots in her lungs, and my dad is being moved to assisted living due to worsening dementia as a result of her prolonged absence— I do not trust myself to temper my response properly, so I hope my response came across okay.)