Novel Education
Psychoanalytic Studies of Learning and Not Learning
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Opening Note
- Chapter 1. Psychoanalytic Studies of Learning and Not Learning
- Chapter 2. Five Excursions into Free Association, or Just Take the A Train
- Chapter 3. A Note to “Identification with the Aggressor”
- Chapter 4. Poor Little Oedipus: On the Pleasures and Disappointments of Sexual Enlightenment
- Chapter 5. Melanie Klein, Little Richard, and the Psychoanalytic Question of Inhibition
- Chapter 6. Monsters in Literature
- Chapter 7. Notes on the Teacher’s Illness
- Chapter 8. What is a Pedagogical Fact? Notes from the Clinical Knowledge Project
- Chapter 9. Writing on the Mind
- Complete Bibliography
- Index
PREFACE
The title of this book came to me while taking notes in a psychoanalytic workshop devoted to the writing of clinical case studies and, so, to the question of narrative. Panelists came to disagree over what seemed to be an economic problem: How much narrative play may analysts have in representing their clinical work? Should the case study be able to note its unconscious dynamics and the drafts of its free association? Beyond the ordinary disguises and needed distortions created to protect the privacy of the analysand, the disagreement toppled into the dynamic tension of fiction as both figment of imagination and the runaway story. If the case study reads like fiction, like metapsychology, what can we say is represented? Far from being an exercise in the death of the author, that day the author of the case study exhibited too much life. I cannot pinpoint where my thoughts began to stray, but along with the doodles that crowded my notes, I began to sketch my own pedagogical and existential concerns. From a pedagogical side, what is it to report, to one’s colleagues and students, the experience of one’s work and remark upon how the ideas made and sometimes discarded there resist and instruct the narrative? How is a case study an encounter with learning and not learning? Existentially, what form of life do words create? What are the psychodynamic tensions within interpretation, the ones analysts create in the analytic time and those that constitute ←vii | viii→the afterwardness of treatment, that is, the writing of the case study? What is it to write therapeutically?
These questions touch on the conflict of hermeneutics, the study of the interpretation of interpretation, or interpretation’s historicity. We mean something beyond what is said, what is said means more than we know, and excess returns to unsettle meaning. In his study of Freud, Ricoeur (1970) suggests two disparate functions of the psychoanalytic interpretation: An interpretation may restore meaning and be made to destroy illusions that are also meaning. Yet how does one tell the difference if the case study may be working at both levels and if the very nature of narrative requires and involves this double action? There also emerged the question of (and what some in the workshop saw as) the analyst’s “flights of fantasy”—wild associations taken through the playground of theory and the audience’s transference. How different can the analyst’s understanding be from the analysand’s own understanding? And would this difference be then seen as either reparative or destructive? Second thoughts on these matters may bring us to the literary problem of representing the work of affect. Here we encounter the noncoincidence of experience to the vicissitudes of its meanings. Here, too, we may glimpse a remarkable, runaway, affected subjectivity. Perhaps the case is that when writing, reading, or listening to the case study, there is no such thing as innocent bystanders; we find ourselves on the side of otherness, the affect.
When we read between its lines and listen for how we are affected by the case study’s theory of learning and not learning, clinical writing alters its purpose. Yet it is precisely in this excess of meaning that loyalties divide. Is the psychoanalytic case study on the side of empiricism and its proof, merely recording what happened? Or, is there an aesthetic, therapeutic consideration that structures both the work and its writing and so therefore presents the excess of what the analytic event cannot contain? What would it mean for a case study to be a study of its own affected divide? Can the case study be affected by the literary qualities of both the subjective world and the act of representing it again in writing? And, if we claim we are writing novels, must that cancel the question of the truth effects of psychoanalysis or even destroy what it can mean to generalize processes of psychical life as now posing an interminable, unruly human condition?
Many of these problems between knowledge and truth, I believe, alter the work of education. There, researchers are asked to settle the best practices, confirm effective methods, and service social adaptation. With governmental pressure for what is known as “evidence-based research,” the researcher is ←viii | ix→required to demonstrate, before it can be carried out, the value of the research. Under the crushing assumption that education can and must be knowable in advance, the uses of research have been reduced to standardized application. On this view, there is no such thing as unrepeatable research. These demands for certainty, stability, and transparency of method place research close to the procedures of an assembly line and defend against the overwhelming anxiety that mass education also presents. And yet, the hegemony of certainty leaves us with its pitiful products: zero tolerance, fear of failure, and technocratic language. On this view, unruly subjectivity becomes an improper study. I say to make a novel education we need to stay close to this affected improper study. Then, research itself can be conceptualized as a thought experiment, as a note of counter-discourse. Let us return research to what it does not know, to let this ignorance come out, and so become our novel education.
What can fiction mean in the helping professions? I bring this question to many of my current learning situations: university professor of education, researcher, candidate in a psychoanalytic institute, analysand, and in my clinical practice as therapist. The studies of learning and not learning gathered here represent my uneasy dialogue between the clinic of education and the clinic of psychoanalysis. Throughout this book, I put pressure on education with psychoanalytic views but also press psychoanalysis to express its theories of learning. I pose these disparate contexts as clinics because they are rare places the mind may take refuge. They can be places to freely wonder over the purpose of both reparation and destruction. They are clinics in the sense that strangers meet to affect ideas and each other. Allowing these sites their fictions, that is, their alienation from taken-for-granted sense—allowing these sites their adventure and disappointment with meaning and their anxieties over significance not yet reached, but still demanding form—creates a transitional space for subjectivity to be without justification, to be an improper study. These are the needed conditions for psychological significance to be risked and for thinking to be made anew.
The chapters that follow are psychoanalytic studies of the value of, and objections to, fiction in conceptualizing and representing the delegates, object relations and history of learning and not learning. Fiction remains as shorthand for the problem of understanding the reach of history, with what becomes of actual events, and with what we make happen from signs. Sometimes I use fiction to signify literary design, as in the writing of novels. At other times, fiction will take its place only in confrontation with affect and trying to know reality as such. Then, fiction will reach into the sublime, into that which ←ix | x→both alienates and fascinates. I will associate with the movements of fiction to understand emotional logic for why we split success from failure, fact from fiction, subjectivity from objectivity, and literature from life. Fiction will cross wires with anxiety, even as it telegraphs its own anxiety. The unreal reality of psychical life will also go under this name, as will discussions of dependency, the transference, and the activity of writing. The Freudian fiction of the drives will be given free reign as will their work of animating its representational vicissitudes. Dreams, too, will be models, as will dream-work, free association, and interpretation.
An underlying question that brings these chapters together begins not with what is novel about education but rather with what a novel education is like. This question invites comparative efforts across the human professions and the humanities, but it also turns on a particular dilemma of how knowing self/other relations affect the nature of the relation, with how, through an interest in psychical reality, object relations, and the literary, knowledge is expressed and its history enlivened. It turns out that there is a literary school concerned with education. Good and bad novels of education are carried out through the genre of the bildungsroman; there bringing up culture prepares the lines for the plot of bringing up of a life. Obstacles will come in the form of characters but also will be the condition for subjective events to affect our narrator. In this literary genre, the narrators, usually at first unwittingly, come to arrange arbitrary life into lessons on learning to live. These are novels of affected psychology and affected education; they may be read as narratives on the passions of learning and not learning but also as points of entry into understanding the work of trying to know the self and the Other. These novels play between the lines of making fiction from life and making life from fiction. How different is this from what we do in learning, from gathering our objects, obstacles, and events to sketch the studies for representing—taking note of—our own novel education?
To ask what a novel education is like will take us into the problem of narrating the emotional experience of learning and not learning and into the question of how the emotions are to be noted and used. There will always be others involved, yet their hands may be invisible. The first half of this book analyzes the history of education in psychoanalytic theory and practice, while the second half narrates contemporary education and its history of trying to know its narrative acts. A theme developed in Chapter One turns on Freud’s double problem of presenting psychoanalysis to the general public while experiencing the surprise of being affected by both its theory and ←x | xi→practice. The history of Freud’s accidental pedagogy will introduce to readers the aesthetic and therapeutic preoccupations of this book, perhaps the key one being how we come to know our representatives of education, then and now. Psychoanalysis gathers objections against its technique to make from these both objects and theory. One of its methods, perhaps the only one that distinguishes psychoanalysis from other therapeutic practices, is the free association, the topic of Chapter Two. There, fiction is accepted for its accidental qualities, only to become a problem of association. The question of narrative freedom may then be noticed. Automatic writing and free writing also take a turn in this second chapter, as will its history of advice from the poets and mythology.
The gathering of objections, now from the vantage of self-alienation and creation will take us into a study of an ego defense known as “identification with the aggressor,” the topic of Chapter Three. This chapter stages conflicts in learning and not learning within the inner world of object relations and the external world of identity politics. Here, fiction gains the momentum of identification, attracted to the emotional situations of love and hate. The painful fiction concerns what the ego will do to sustain a needed relationship that does not satisfy, and that takes the ego into conditions of oppressive love. The pleasurable fiction is that aggression may well be one way the ego sets itself loose from the confines of compliance to make its own demands. The chapter has a further purpose in that this psychoanalytic concept has migrated into discussions of postcoloniality and anti-racist pedagogy, used there as a lens to consider self/other relations. At times, when brought to social theory, we are apt to disengage this ego defense from its relation to phantasy. The place of the unconscious will also make agency insecure. As with most psychoanalytic language, the concept of “identification with the aggressor” I argue, cannot be understood as an explanatory device, but can be used to imagine mundane development as involving tenderness, passion, aggression, and alienation.
Chapters Four and Five turn to problems of education as they are played out in the history of analytic relations between children and adults. These chapters visit the psychoanalytic archive, rummaging for what is left to think. Education will appear through its most fantastic qualities as wishes, anxieties, magical learning, and as questions that cannot be answered. In Chapter Four, readers meet the early case studies of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as these analysts work through the improbable question, what is sexual enlightenment? I argue that the eighteenth-century question of what is enlightenment became, in the twentieth century, a failed project of determining what ←xi | xii→sexual enlightenment is. There, theories of existence between the adult and the child write their own private novels. Learning will take on magical qualities, but so, too, will this magic be disillusioned with the analyst’s attempt to interpret the affects of love and hate. Chapter Five continues a study of the psychoanalytic archive, now focusing on the question of inhibition through Melanie Klein’s work with Little Richard at the height of World War II. Richard’s symptoms tell a novel story of psychoanalytic education and love: He used his psychoanalysis to explore the meaning of existence, aggression, and forgiveness. But Klein also narrates this story as one of being affected by Richard. In both chapters, the novel education emerges from how the analyst and analysand transform their respective questions.
Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight continue with the theme of being affected by representing the felt experiences of learning and not learning. Chapter Six analyzes two disturbances of memory and problems in recollection. The first disturbance is contained in a birthday greeting Freud wrote to the author Romain Rolland. The second falls under the auspices of how the problem of teaching fiction turned out to be a story of destruction. The teacher’s memory is disturbed when narrating a story of trying to remember learning to teach. Chapter Seven takes a different view of disturbances, with notes on the teacher’s depression. There, I consider the fictions that defend against encountering the teacher’s illness. I arrange this chapter as a series of notes to convey something of the chaos of representing illness and to suggest the incompleteness of my sketches. I draw upon psychoanalytic discussions of the analyst’s education, and the idea that the analyst’s education invites the analyst’s madness that is already there. What can it mean for education to contain the teacher’s madness when the teacher’s history of education may be a part of the story of illness? Fiction appears differently in this chapter through Freud’s idea of the transference in the analytic setting and how, as an artificial illness, it may be interpreted. I suggest that the term “teacher burn out” is cover for the teacher’s depression, but also that illness—rather than be confined to the discourse of attributes—can be conceived as a substitute to a missing or broken relation. Objections to conceptualizing the teacher’s illness come from many sources, including the profession of education.
Chapter Eight raises contemporary questions of how we know education. I consider a persistent problem in psychoanalytic practice that also may animate our sense of education and what can be imagined from our fact of natality and existence as such. In psychoanalysis, the ongoing debate is born from the interminable question: What is a clinical fact? This question was ←xii | xiii→raised in Chapter Six, from the vantage of memory. In Chapter Eight, two dilemmas are brought into tension. One emerges from representing clinical practice. This is the tension between being addressed by the idiomatic aspects of intersubjectivity and constructing a theory from what is particular and perhaps unrepeatable in intersubjective practice. A second dilemma follows. It concerns the relation between objectivity and subjectivity and what each perspective means for representing the emotional world of teaching and learning. Both suggest a constitutive problem with subjective practices in the human professions, where analysts and teachers must depend upon their subjectivity in order to practice at all but in doing so experience epistemological uncertainty, anxiety, and the transference. Stretching this clinical question to education I ask, “What is a pedagogical fact?” How do we characterize our work as mediating reality and as affecting the self’s perception of mediation? Can a fact keep company with subjectivity as a relation? This chapter, too, considers the playground of fiction, now from the vantage of understanding the actions of what is so subjective and so accidental about our work.
Details
- Pages
- XVI, 202
- Publication Year
- 2006
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433195495
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433195501
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781433195518
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9780820486666
- DOI
- 10.3726/b19932
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2022 (September)
- Keywords
- Lernpsychologie Psychoanalyse Psychoanalysis Aesthectic Psychology of teaching
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2006. XVI, 202 pp.
