Between Philosophy and Politics

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You are at once a practicing analyst and a scholar of psychoanalysis who has looked at both the continuities and discontinuities between Freud and contemporary psychoanalysis. I hope we can talk about the issues raised in your work, but I’m also interested in the personal motivations that draw people to psychoanalysis. So, if I might, I’d like to begin by asking you what led you to become a psychoanalyst.

Stephen A. Mitchell

One could take it back to many different points, depending on how you wanted to enter into this. I grew up in suburban New Jersey, and for the last two years of high school I went to Horace Mann in New York. That was a difficult experience in various ways, but it opened the world up intellectually for me. I got very interested in literature, literary criticism, and Freud. So I was introduced to Freud.

PLR

Even in high school?

SAM

Yes. I was thinking about this for this interview, and it must have been after my junior year. I read the five-volume edition of Freud’s Collected Papers.

PLR

The Riviere translation.

SAM

Right. I remember being very intrigued. So when I went to college, it was with the intention of being a psychology major and studying psychoanalysis.

PLR

Where did you go?

SAM

I went to Yale. The introductory psych course was terrific. It was taught by a guy who had Jungian predilections, and it was very exciting.

PLR

Who was the teacher?

SAM

Michael Kahn was his name. A Michael Kahn has written me some letters in response to my books over the last couple of years, and it suddenly dawned on me that this might be the same Michael Kahn who was my freshman teacher.

PLR

That’s funny. Did he know that you were his student?

SAM

No. He wouldn’t have known because it was a gigantic lecture course with 100 or 120 kids. So I wrote him a letter saying, “Could you possibly be the same Michael Kahn …?” He said, “Yes, in fact I am. So glad to know because it makes me feel proud.” It was nice.

PLR

That’s the teacher’s fantasy: “He was my student.”

SAM

I did well by him. Anyhow, that was a great course. I became interested in Joseph Campbell. But then, in my sophomore year, I took six different semester courses in psychology to explore that as a major, and I hated it. It was very behaviorally oriented and quite antipsychoanalytic. So I ended up majoring in History, the Arts, and Letters, a very broad, cross-disciplinary major. That was absolutely wonderful. By my senior year, I had three interests. I was still very interested in psychoanalysis and psychology. I had become very interested in philosophy—Yale was very strong in philosophy—especially problems in 19th-century philosophy, which of course was the context in which Freud operated. And I was also very interested in politics. This was the mid-to-late 1960s. I got very caught up in the antiwar movement.

PLR

When did you graduate?

SAM

1968. In that major, you spent the senior year writing a thesis, and my thesis was called, very grandiosely, Man and the State. I worked with a terrific professor of 19th-century philosophy.

PLR

Who was that?

SAM

Karsten Harries. He wrote a book on the philosophy of modern art as well. I audited lots of philosophy courses, and I had what amounted to a tutorial with Harries for my senior year. I loved him. When I graduated from Yale, I was unsure which way I wanted to go. In fact, I applied to Yale in philosophy.

PLR

To graduate school?

SAM

Yes. I was very interested in political goings-on. I had read Nietzsche. I was involved in the antiwar movement and talked to people about community organizing. The interests in philosophy and politics ended up collapsing back into psychoanalysis. One of Nietzsche’s main concerns was demonstrating that the prior 2,000 years of Western philosophy had taken a wrong turn by thinking too much about what man should be instead of looking at what man was. The development of a perspective on what man should be involved a contempt for human nature and human experience. So philosophy began to dovetail back into psychology for me. And the more I learned about political action, the more I began to feel the same way about that. Sol Alinsky came to Yale and talked about what it was like to move into a community, help people organize themselves, leave, and then have it collapse again. Unless you could change people internally, there was no way you could involve yourself in effective political action. So politics too circled back into the study of man or human nature.