Knowing and Not Knowing

Thinking psychosocially about learning and resistance to learning

Claudia Lapping, Tamara Bibby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138392267
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317235613
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The social world is saturated with powerful formations of knowledge that colonise individual and institutional identities. Some knowledge emerges as legitimised and authoritative; other knowledge is resisted or repressed. Psychosocial approaches highlight the unstable basis of knowledge, learning and research; of knowing and not knowing. How do we come to formulate knowledge in the ways that we do? Are there other possible ways of knowing that are too difficult or unsettling for us to begin to explore? Do we need the authority of legitimised institutions and regularized methods to build secure knowledge? What might it mean to build insecure edifices of knowledge? How might we trouble notions of knowledge in processes of teaching, learning and research?

This collection addresses these questions, drawing on a range of psychoanalytic and social theory, from Bion, Freud and Lacan, to Derrida, Kristeva and Zizek. Showcasing work from North America, Europe and Japan, contributors explore writing as a practice that can stabilise or unsettle subjectivities; the unconscious relations between school practices, subjectivities, educational spaces and ideologies; implications of the productive energies and the deadening inwardness associated with mourning and melancholia for formal and informal learning; and the authority we invest in apparently rigid or ephemeral institutional spaces. Strongly empirical as well as theoretical in approach, this collection will be of interest to students and academics seeking ways to resist normative orders of legitimacy and coherence in education and research. This book was originally published as a special issue of Pedagogy, Culture & Society.

Interrupting the frame: reflective practice in the classroom and the consulting room

Julie Walsh

Institute of Advanced Study/Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

In this paper I consider some of the affinities between the teacher–student dynamic in academic supervision, and the therapist–patient dynamic in the therapeutic relation. Drawing on my own experiences, I identify several difficulties that pertain to these two settings. First, in the context of the classroom, I consider how the requirement to speak and the requirement to write call for different modes of engagement, and can provoke different types of anxiety. I explore the function of mediating texts as a way of engendering a critical distance from one’s own speech acts. I then turn to Sigmund Freud’s intriguing evocation of the quality of ‘aloofness’ as that which should colour the patient’s engagement with the transference situation. I shall treat Freud’s recommendation of aloofness as a mode of critical distance – and a type of impersonality – that can be put to work in the classroom as well as in the consulting room. Finally, I ask what happens when distance fails; when there seems to be no space for impersonal critique. One way of thinking about the failure of distance is through the lens of shame. Here I focus my thought on the contention that the scope for shaming is especially prominent in vocational settings that challenge and interrogate the subject’s capacity to know.

Introduction

I am sitting opposite a young man of 19 years of age. It’s just the two of us. We’ve not met before. Let’s call him Matthew. We’ve been in the room together for over 10 minutes now and we’ve not got started. Matthew cannot meet my gaze. I offer another possibility of a beginning: Matthew shrugs his shoulders and blushes ferociously. By anyone’s standards this is not going so well. ‘This is difficult stuff’ I suggest, ‘but we can think it through together’. Matthew is quietly shaking. What on earth is going through his head, and what is my responsibility here? ‘If only this was therapy’, I think to myself, ‘that would be easier’.

My encounter with Matthew took place in the classroom rather than the consulting room. It was one incident among many that made me consider the affinities between the teacher–student dynamic in academic supervision, and the therapist–patient dynamic in the therapeutic relation. The question I was asking myself in this instance – what is going on for Matthew? – highlights the rather obvious fact that it is not only the second party in these pairings (i.e. the student or patient) who can feel exposed for her ignorance, and get caught up in the frustrations that ensue. I have taken the Psychosocial Studies Network’s conference ‘Knowing and Not Knowing: Thinking Psychosocially About Learning and Resistance to Learning’ as an opportunity to develop my reflections on this theme in relation to my work as an early career academic and as a psychotherapist in training. I am not concerned here to advance a particular theoretical framework for my thoughts, but rather to identify in broad terms some of the affinities that I have experienced between these two frames of activity. As an exercise in reflective practice, then, this paper comments on my understanding of the ways in which modes of knowing and not-knowing create the unstable grounds for any educative and/or therapeutic encounter. As my opening illustration perhaps already suggests, the challenge of bearing – and bearing witness to – a not-knowing can prove most difficult to tolerate. I am interested in thinking about how the different fields in which I work serve this particular difficulty: Can not-knowing in the classroom be thought about in terms other than deficit? How is the relationship between knowledge and authority differently configured for the teacher and the therapist? How might the desire for knowledge be a help or a hindrance in the educative or therapeutic project? As a teacher and a therapist how can the unknown impact of my speech be thought about? In what ways are the dynamics of distance and intimacy co-fashioned in the educative and/or therapeutic encounter?

Drawing on my own experiences I have identified below three areas that have emerged as common ground between the classroom and the consulting room. I shall consider how the requirement to speak and the requirement to write call for different modes of engagement, and can provoke different types of anxiety. The demand made of students to orally defend their own written work can generate an unproductive level of self-consciousness in which the student appears trapped by her own language. Comparable situations in therapy sessions have given me cause to think about the value of a critical distance from one’s own linguistic productions, and techniques for engendering such a distance; I shall explore the function of ‘mediating texts’ as one such example. I shall then turn to Sigmund Freud’s intriguing evocation of the quality of ‘aloofness’ as that which should colour the patient’s engagement with the transference situation. I shall treat Freud’s recommendation of aloofness as a mode of critical distance – and a type of impersonality – that can be put to work in the classroom as well as in the consulting room. Finally, and in recognition of my opening vignette, I ask what happens when distance fails; when there seems to be no space for impersonal critique. One way of thinking about the failure of distance is through the lens of shame. Shame comes to the fore when the subject feels herself to have been seen too closely, or to have been exposed as being somehow out-of-place. Here I focus my thought on the contention that the scope for shaming is especially prominent in vocational settings that challenge and interrogate the subject’s capacity to know. Taking on board Slavoj Žižek’s (2008) provocation that shame is the inevitable affective consequence of being asked a question, I ask how the shaming of the teacher’s or therapist’s questions might function positively.

Writing and speaking

Staying with Matthew, the student for whom sitting with me in academic supervision appeared to be unbearable, I would like to try to account for the failure of the encounter. In supervision, Matthew and I were due to be talking about his essay on the topic of Freud’s theories of sexuality. It would be unreasonable to presume that this topic can be picked up by all students with ease: as a teacher when I speak of psychosexual desire (and introduce the concepts of penis envy, polymorphous perversity, infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex and the incest taboo, for example), I am asking a lot for my students to speak back to me in the same language. Had we been discussing the status of psychoanalysis as a science, say, Matthew and I may have had a more comfortable supervision. But perhaps not; perhaps it was simply the injunction to speak rather than speaking about sexuality that proved difficult. I’ve found that students can often write eloquently about a given topic but not necessarily speak about it, and I do not think that this is at all unique to the psychoanalytic subject matter. There is something especially demanding, I would suggest, in asking a student to account for their written work after the event, which is precisely the logic of the supervision system where students and supervisors meet one-on-one and take the student’s essay as the catalyst for discussion. The written and spoken word are only loosely related, and it is not always the case that competency in the former is indexed to confidence in the latter. Students demonstrate this frequently through their discomfort, anxiety and confusion at the task of saying again in speech what they feel they have already said on the page. But it is precisely in the gap that opens up between these two modes of representation that the lesson itself gets started. Practically, from the perspective of certain educative goals, this gap or disconnect might lead to the student becoming more attentive to the requirements of academic writing (focussing on the clarity of her written expression, and the structure of her argument, for example). However, just as importantly, by scrutinising the distance between her so-called ‘authorial intent’ and a reader’s reception of it, the student may come to a more experiential appreciation of the frustrations of language that psychoanalysis – some traditions more so than others – makes central to its theorising. The student may reflect: ‘I don’t recognise my meaning in these words’; ‘these words do not represent me’; ‘I cannot be identical with the words I use to represent myself’; ‘I cannot know how my reader will interpret my words which are already distant from me’.

The tension between the written and spoken word can be considered from another angle: if students can resist speaking about their own writing, then a sort of parallel can happen in therapy when a patient expresses the desire to communicate with the analyst via email or letter outside the session. As I read it, the desire to subvert, or outwit, the ‘talking cure’ in this way could be indicative of the fantasy that there may be a way of being more true to oneself – of representing oneself more fully – if only the conditions of self-narration would allow it. For some, the possibility of expressing oneself through the written word – where time can be taken to arrange and rearrange the order of one’s words creating the impression of coherence, exactitude and purpose – is infinitely preferable to being constantly caught short by one’s speech. I am reminded of patients who begin their therapy by articulating the wish that it could proceed without words (can there be another way, I ask myself). Perhaps, then, there is something shared between the student who involves herself in the act of deconstructing her own written work, and the patient who undertakes the work of psychotherapy, if only because what is played out in both instances is the experience of being subject to the failures and frustrations of language: whereas the student might say ‘I know what I mean, but I can’t explain it’, or ‘when I wrote that I think I meant something else’, or ‘yes, it’s what you said, that’s what I meant, but you said it better’, the patient is more likely to remain silent.

Mediating texts

Accepting that individual students may find the prospect of speaking (rather than writing) anxiety-inducing, the educational setting has all sorts of ‘props’ to defend against too much exposure; the central prop being the text itself. With the text comes the introduction of a third element that can intervene in the dyadic relation. In the case of my supervision with Matthew, I was able to say: ‘let’s turn to the text’, where the subtext was perhaps: ‘let’s avert our eyes from each other and find some neutral ground’. Because the student and I now have some autonomous material to address (which exists in a relatively impersonal relation to both of us), one would hope that working directly on the text would immediately reduce the type of anxiety that can be experienced. In the classroom, then, the possibility of a mediating text is always close at hand. There is a parallel observation to be made here with the work of psychotherapy. When a patient comes along with her own text-fragment (whether it be dream material, or a chain of associations that arise in the session) she too is bringing something into the frame that has the potential to act in a mediating capacity. The introduction of this third element in a session may function in all sorts of ways (only one of which could be to alleviate anxiety), but the conditions for going to work on the text are, it strikes me, especially precarious. Most critically, in order to explore the text-fragment the patient must already possess the capacity to hold herself at some distance from it.

I am reminded here of one of Freud’s discussions of the analytic requirement to manage the patient’s ‘transference neurosis’. In the third section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud (1920) gives a brief history of the ways in which psychoanalytic technique evolved within the time of his own theorising. He tells us that initially psychoanalytic technique had been an ‘art of interpretation’ where what was crucial was the analyst’s communication of unconscious material to the patient. However, such conscious – we might say ‘educative’ – communication failed to have therapeutic impact, and so greater attention had to be paid to the patient’s resistances to his unconscious material. The provocation of the patient’s resistances brings into the frame the transference phenomenon, where it is the patient’s performative engagement with her resistances (rather than her conscious acknowledgement of them) that ensures the continuing mobilisation of the treatment. As Freud explains it:

The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. Thus he acquires no sense of conviction of the correctness of the construction that has been communicated to him. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past … The ratio between what is remembered and what is reproduced varies from case to case. The physician cannot as a rule spare his patient this phase of the treatment. He must get him to re-experience some portion of his forgotten life, but must see to it, on the other hand, that the patient retains some degree of aloofness, which will enable him, in spite of everything, to recognise that what appears to be reality is in fact only a reflection of a forgotten past. (Freud 1920, 18–19)

The most intriguing point that Freud raises in this passage, I would suggest, is the recommendation that the analyst cultivate the patient’s ‘aloofness’ [Überlegenheit] in order that the peculiar power of the transference be seen for what it is (i.e. a repetition or ‘reflection’ of a past situation).¹ Rather than take aloofness in this context to mean a psychological disposition of superiority, which would surely be interpreted as another form of resistance to the material, I take Freud to be referring to the patient’s capacity to distance herself from the transferential material. This is indeed a tall order: the patient is in the throws of the transference but is yet required to maintain sufficient distance (with the analyst’s aid) to be able to appreciate the formal qualities of her emotional investments. Leaving to one side the taken-for-granted neutrality of the analyst, Freud’s thought seems to be that a degree of distance on the patient’s part is a prerequisite for any interpretative work to commence. Resuming my previous comparison, then, for the patient to be able to engage with her own text-fragment in such a way that allows the work of interpretation to be taken up, she must be both invested in the enactment, and able to appreciate its form. I am inclined to think that there is a sort of learning at stake in all of this; that sometimes part of the work is to invite simultaneous investment and detachment towards the ‘text’ in question; to encourage the subject (whether the subject of education and/or therapy) to aspire to a degree of ‘aloofness’ with regard to her own material; to encourage her in her capacity as ‘reader’ of her own material where the very act of reading requires a standing to one side; and, in so doing, to explore the possibility of an impersonal relation to the self. I would suggest that in my supervision with Matthew we did not manage to achieve this type of impersonal investment in the material that facilitates critical reading. Importantly, it is this failing that opens the door to shame. However, there is a paradox to be anticipated here (and pursued further below): whilst I would acknowledge that the persistence of a destructive and immobile mode of shame may account for my negative supervision experience with Matthew, I shall also reserve the possibility that the very same shame-dynamics – those of proximity and distance; situatedness and dislocation – can work productively to mobilise the type of impersonality that I suggest is key to critical reflection, and that Freud suggested was necessary to the patient’s handling of the transference.

What I have indicated so far is that the substantive topic in question – in this case psychoanalysis and sexuality – may be sufficiently difficult to create an awkward atmosphere in academic supervision, or to provoke a communicative impasse. Furthermore, there are innumerable factors relating to a particular student’s psychobiography that are not for me to concern myself with too directly in the classroom. I remarked above that Matthew’s apparent distress would have been easier for me to take on board had we been in a therapy context; but in supervision the force of his feelings were not the legitimate object of our discussion. The thought I would like to raise now is that these factors – the particular topic of discussion, and the student’s idiosyncratic psychology – can be left to one side as we consider a more general difficulty that pertains to both the classroom and the consulting room.

Shame and the question form

In his Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Journal as methodological archive: introduction to a cataloguing system for insecure knowledge
• 1. Interrupting the frame: reflective practice in the classroom and the consulting room
• 2. Bringing up gender: academic abjection?
• 3. Writing in a foreign language as a science of writing or grammatology
• 4. The enjoyment of space: the university campus in students’ narratives and photography
• 5. Learning to fail and learning from failure – ideology at work in a mathematics classroom
• 6. Reconstructing memory through the archives: public pedagogy, citizenship and Letizia Battaglia’s photographic record of mafia violence
• 7. Psychoanalytic notes on the status of depression in curriculum affected by histories of loss
• 8. Explorations in knowing: thinking psychosocially about legitimacy
• 9. Going spiral? Phenomena of ‘half-knowledge’ in the experiential large group as temporary learning community
• Index