This paper inquires into the possibilities and impossibilities of learning from experience within the field of academic work itself, presenting core findings from an interview study based on socio-biographical narratives of 46 academics in Norway, which we analysed along in-depth hermeneutic lines.

In 2014 Maggie O’Neal evoked the notion of “mental space” (Young 1994) to refer to what goes missing in the constant increase of requirements in today’s corporate academia. In this paper we investigate what we see in our material as a conspicuous drive to collude in this demise of “mental space”. Key to this complicity, we hold, is the notion of “privilege.” “It is an absolute privilege to have an academic job and to be paid to do scholarly work,” goes the chorus of practically all our interviewees.

Far from being a mere gesture of modesty, however, the reference to privilege seems to hold a deeper truth. According to the OED, a privilege is the “enjoyment of some benefit […] above the average or that deemed usual or necessary for a particular group” (OED, 2023; emphasis added). Along these lines, a privilege comes to mean something that one does not fully earn or deserve. Hence, the repeated reference to privilege appeared to us as a tacit and often unarticulated sense of indebtedness and guilt attached to one’s occupation and position.

It is this sense of guilt, we argue, which urge academics to collude in the erosion and hollowing out of “mental space” in academia. With academics being under the impression that occupying such space is excessive, it is pushed further and further toward the margins. This uncommoning of mental space may have severe consequences for the ability, vital for creative scientific pursuits, to employ human imaginaries in a ‘subtle interplay’ (Winnicott 1953) with the world.

This paper reflects on the processes according to which academics give an account of their work. Whereas audit-like accountability measures may once have been seen as a means to ensure quality, they have come to be widely perceived as all-consuming ends in themselves, as little more than instruments to turn universities into consumer-oriented corporations, academics and students into little entrepreneurs. That the norms of an audit culture are no longer self-evident has led to searching questions, but this loss of legitimacy has also meant that academic work is now subject to increasingly authoritarian rule: without unquestioned legitimacy, they must be enforced. To grasp how the soft authoritarianism of the university operates, it is instructive to consider what Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose call a ‘decisive event in the genealogy of authority,’ namely, the emergence of ‘psychotherapeutic authority,’ which is being deployed in universities today to apprehend resistance to standardised quantifiable forms of accountability in the interests of ‘wellness’ and ‘self-actualisation.’ The paper offers a reading of a recently published Jung-inspired self-help book co-authored by a university Deputy Vice Chancellor. This isi read against Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, which uses 'psychotherapeutic authority' against itself. To get at why and how Adorno’s ‘melancholy science’ holds greater hope for universities than the buoyant optimism of its managerialist counterpart, I contrast the very different concepts of the unconscious with which they work.

This paper explores the relationship between psychosocial dynamics and gendered inequalities in contemporary academia. Gender scholars have claimed that the shift to ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Leslie 1997), and its associated forms of governance and positional competition, instigates subtle and indirect, yet deepened, processes of re-masculinization (Aléman 2014; do Mar Pereira 2017; Lund & Tienari 2019). This paper contributes with an enhanced conception of the psychosocial dynamics involved in these processes. Drawing on a free-association narrative interview study (Hollway & Jefferson 2012) with 48 professors, post docs and PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences at a research university in Norway we describe how current conditions of academic work promotes splitting (Klein 1932 and 1946; Brennan 2000, 24-26) and excommunication (Lorenzer 1973; see Aarseth, Krüger & Nielsen 2023). We analyse how splitting emerges in our participants’ efforts to handle tensions between subjective emotional processes involved in creative pursuits, on the one hand, and the requirement to do well in the positional competition, on the other. We suggest that further developing a historical materialist feminist conception of Eros is key to conceptualising the gendered power dynamics expressed in the splitting.

Denunciations of conservative extremism, sadism, and conspiratorial thinking are mainstays of contemporary academia. Amid this important work, we may not see how our own structures of desire mirror, prop up, or even directly constitute similar discourses. This paper examines two cases: professors who propagated conspiracy theories about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, and ethnographers who pathologized and denigrated Appalachian serpent handlers to the point of sadistic enjoyment when preachers die.

Conspiracy theorists and serpent handlers are both examples of psychosis in Jacques Lacan’s structural terms. Both compensate for the dissolution of shared symbolic “law” by developing their own idiosyncratic, highly literal symbolic networks which they espouse with absolute certainty. Mainstream academic research looks similar in asserting hidden, omnipresent structures with total conviction and employing styles of “paranoid reading.” The leap between the mainstream careers of Jim Fetzer, James Tracy, “Dr. Eowyn,” and other professors attests to this structural resonance.

Serpent-handlers read the Bible literally, including a passage in Mark 16 which reads “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name…They shall take up serpents.” Anthropologist Weston La Barre employed participant observation and psychoanalytic methods to determine that these people, who he wrongly generalized as illiterate and brutish, were essentially phallus-worshippers. His conclusions of the early 1960s contribute to a more general disdain and mockery of these Holiness believers, including a modern Internet phenomenon where secular leftists (among others) mock their deaths from snakebite.

These strands of sadism and psychosis in academic thought suggest that we might be subject to our own psychoanalytic criticism. Ultimately, I suggest a return to a rhetorical understanding of theory in which we can never be certain, but should instead seek the polysemic opportunities in language where we might otherwise develop structures that, however comforting, sometimes mirror what we seek to oppose.