A Vision for a Health Humanities Center: Healing the Cultural Unconscious

This is an aspirational vision for a Health Humanities Center at a dream university—one that bridges psychoanalytic psychotherapy training with the rich insights of the humanities and the medical sciences. At the heart of this vision lies a fundamental critique of current academic and clinical training programs, including MFA therapy programs and clinical psychology graduate programs. While valuable in many respects, these programs often fail to engage with what Lacan called “the truth of the unconscious,” rendering them insufficient for addressing the full complexities of mental health and care.

However, the mission of this envisioned Health Humanities Center goes far beyond supplementing the health sciences with humanistic perspectives to help them “better understand health.” Instead, it reimagines the role of the humanities as central to understanding and healing the diseases of our culture. Drawing inspiration from The Authors of Silence, this vision sees the humanities as essential to curing what Derrida called “archive fever”—the illnesses and discontents embedded in the cultural unconscious, shaped by the traumas of history, systemic oppression, and silences surrounding foundational injustices such as slavery, genocide, and inequality.

Healing the Cultural Unconscious through the Humanities

As The Authors of Silence suggests, the humanities have always been about grappling with and healing the unconscious of our culture—the memory base, meaning base, and symbolic base that underpin society. This imagined Health Humanities Center would take this mission seriously, focusing not on how the humanities can enhance the health sciences, but on how the humanities themselves require healing to address the cultural traumas they are tasked with interrogating.

This play serves as an example of how the humanities can explore these traumas. It delves into the silences of the Founding Fathers—authors of the nation who remained silent on issues of slavery, genocide, and rape—revealing how their contradictions seeded systemic inequalities that persist to this day. Just as the play examines these cultural wounds through a cyborgian lens, the Health Humanities Center would explore how to reanimate the humanities as a site for collective healing, resisting the “archive fever” that Derrida critiques: the compulsion to repeat, preserve, and reproduce cultural patterns without fully confronting their pathogenic dimensions.

Reimagining Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

This imagined Health Humanities Center would transform psychoanalytic psychotherapy training by challenging the dominant institutional structures of knowledge production—what Lacan referred to as the “discourse of the University.” These structures privilege authority, neutrality, and mastery, often at the expense of deeper truths. The unconscious, as a disruptive and unquantifiable force, resists institutionalization and the reductive empiricism of traditional clinical psychology programs. In contrast, this Center would fully integrate psychoanalytic theory, critical humanities perspectives, and real-world clinical care to address the complexities of mental health.

The Center would host an innovative clinical master’s program in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, rejecting metrics-driven care in favor of a more humanistic approach. This model would draw on philosophy, critical theory, literature, and psychoanalytic traditions to cultivate a nuanced understanding of the unconscious and its role in shaping both individual and collective experiences.

The Humanities’ Role in Healing

Rather than viewing the humanities as secondary or supplemental to health sciences, this Center would reclaim their role as essential tools for healing cultural and psychological illness. The humanities—through philosophy, literature, history, and critical theory—offer profound insights into the human condition and the ways in which suffering is shaped by cultural, political, and historical forces. By centering the humanities in health education, the Center would create a space for exploring not only individual mental health but also the broader health of the cultural unconscious.

For example:

• Philosophy offers existential and ethical frameworks for understanding suffering, responsibility, and care.

• Critical Theory critiques the socio-political structures that commodify mental health and perpetuate alienation.

• Psychoanalysis provides tools for understanding the symbolic and relational dimensions of human life.

This interdisciplinary approach would help students and clinicians grapple with the deeper causes of psychological distress—both individual and cultural—and imagine more holistic forms of care.

Workshopping the Play: A Cyborgian Model of Healing and Creation

One of the Center’s key pedagogical tools would be The Authors of Silence, a play that embodies the Center’s mission. In my graduate course The Narrative Arts and Lacan's Four Discourses, this play is workshopped collaboratively with students, emphasizing the dynamic and evolving nature of its creation. Like the humanities themselves, the play is never intended to exist in a final form. Instead, it evolves over time through the contributions of multiple classes, blurring the line between AI authorship and human authorship.

Students are encouraged to engage with the cyborgian nature of the play—its origins in AI and its transformation through human collaboration. Over time, the goal is for students to feel such deep ownership of the work that the original AI contribution becomes indistinguishable from their own authorship. This iterative process mirrors the goals of Digital Humanities, where technology and human creativity are intertwined to foster connection and community. In this way, the play and the Center both challenge the idea of the solitary author, instead emphasizing collective creation and care.

Situating the Vision in Digital Humanities Centers

The envisioned Health Humanities Center would collaborate with institutions like PRAx at Oregon State University and the forthcoming DH Center at Rowan University. These Digital Humanities Centers provide the technological and collaborative resources necessary to bring such an ambitious project to life. By situating the production of The Authors of Silence and similar initiatives within these spaces, the Center could showcase the transformative potential of DH in addressing both personal and cultural traumas.

A New Standard for Health Humanities

Ultimately, this vision for a Health Humanities Center is about rethinking the relationship between the humanities and health. It is not enough for the humanities to serve as a supplement to other disciplines. Instead, the humanities must be understood as essential to the health of our culture, providing tools to confront the “archive fever” of our collective unconscious and heal the wounds of history. By fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, centering the truth of the unconscious, and integrating psychoanalysis with humanistic inquiry, this Center would redefine what it means to care for both individuals and societies.

Together, we can imagine a future where the humanities and psychoanalysis work hand in hand—not only to improve mental health care but to address the deeper sicknesses of our culture, creating spaces for reflection, healing, and collective transformation.