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Teaching Freud Now: Time Traveling Dialogues

Author(s) : Louis Roussel

Reviews and Endorsements

Teaching Freud Now: Time-Traveling Dialogues is an outstanding book, which should be read by everyone teaching psychoanalytic concepts and practice. With a focus on Freud’s papers, Dr. Roussel invites his students to join him in imagining Freud’s search for greater understanding of his patients, a search reflected in the changes in Freud's thinking from one paper to another. One senses in the transcript of the classes, the excitement generated as the students see the similarities between their struggles and Freud’s. Dr. Roussel’s style of teaching leads not to an idealized theory (which for too many analyses results in a therapeutic impasse) but to an experience that increases the students’ comfort in closely examining their own work. Essentially, the consideration of Freud’s struggles to find useful ways to help his patients encourages students, candidates and graduates alike, to sharpen their own thinking about their patients and themselves.
Practicing psychoanalysis is difficult; one is constantly dealing with uncertainty. Dr. Roussel’s willingness to explore his own analytic work without any defensiveness or attempt to appear invulnerable leads to the students‘ increasing ability to do the same. As he says “I tried to convey that struggle, tension and uncertainty are inherent to the process of learning psychoanalysis…” This book is a superb guide for all forms of teaching…not just for teaching Freud or psychoanalysis.
Judith Fingert Chused, MD, Emeritus Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst, Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, Emeritus Supervising Psychoanalyst, Denver, Cleveland, and Seattle Institutes. Emeritus Clinical Professor of Behavioral Sciences and of Pediatrics, George Washington School of Medicine

'Dr. Louis Roussel beautifully demonstrates his innovative ideas about teaching and engaging a class to facilitate learning. He outlines his core teaching principles, then provides us with a fascinating casebook of classes teaching various texts of Freud’s (three clinical papers and three theoretical ones) illustrating with each the dialogue between all class members, which includes the instructor. The class is asked to engage with Freud, pose questions and imagine Freud’s responses; to share their own reactions and associations to the text, and to listen to other’s responses as the class plays with not only Freud’s ideas, but their own; and as they consider what Freud is struggling with in the paper, to relate this to their own struggles both clinically and personally. As a result, candidates experience the class as without outside authority where ideas are seen with fresh eyes, where they and their reactions and associations to the text, to each other, and to ideas are taken seriously, and their encounter with these ideas comes alive in the 21st century. Whether your interest is in Freud or an ingenious, original method of teaching, I highly recommend Dr. Roussel’s book.
Jill M. Miller, PhD, FABP, Co-Editor-In-Chief, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Training Analyst and Supervisor, The Washington Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute; and a Child and Adolescent Supervisor

"Try to let yourself be a tourist in a strange land," Dr. Louis Roussel tells his students as they encounter Freud’s writings, sensibility, and struggles. What a journey it is, and what a guide we have! We drop in on Roussel’s classes on key Freudian texts – those that nearly every psychoanalytic candidate must grapple with – as if we are reading a diary of the most personal and intimate kind … which, in essence, we are. In Teaching Freud Now, we learn so much new about Freudian concepts, the problems they were – and still are – meant to address, and the nature of teaching, clinical work, and ourselves. This book is truly unique – the definitive must-read. Dr. Roussel has given psychoanalysis a precious gift.
Mitchell Wilson, MD, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

This is a deeply human book of far broader relevance than the title—Teaching Freud Now: Time-Traveling Dialogues might suggest to readers beyond the world of psychoanalysis. While Freud’s writings are the landscape on which the pedagogical, transtemporal conversations take place, author Louis Roussel and his students collaboratively grapple with the significance of Freud’s writings and method not only for their own practices of psychoanalysis, but also for their personal lives of growth, self-understanding, and collegiality. In this way, the presentation is akin to Freud’s empirical and adaptive process of theory development for the sake of healing and wholeness, and is eminently transferable to other caregiving practices, especially those of teaching all kinds of listening arts.
Drawing from deep wells of knowledge from study and practice, as well as his commitment to benefit his students and through them their patients, Roussel brings transparency and a fresh spirit to psychoanalytic training. Taking the time to sit with these dialogues of reflective andragogy will enhance the experience of all teachers. Indeed, it just may lead to “incarnating a love of discovery in pursuit of the unknown” (Roussel’s words).
Susan S. Phillips, PhD, sociologist and professor of spirituality, has for many years trained psychotherapists and spiritual directors