Freud, Lacan, Zizek and Education

Exploring Unconscious Investments in Policy and Practice

Claudia Lapping

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351111256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Education
• Index: Business

All areas of education policy and practice are driven by unconscious investments in ignorance, or idealised images of transformation of the individual, society and economy. The promise of fulfilment and associated threats of disappointment or destruction tend to dominate conscious accounts of education. Other more vulnerable or unspeakable aspects of our engagements with education are covered over when we account for learning, and justify teaching as professionals, policy makers and researchers; but they leak out in slips, lapses, emphasis, paradox and contradiction.

Freud's account of resistance and repetition; Lacan's theorisation of the role of language and desire; and Zizek's elaboration of these ideas in a theory of ideology and enjoyment – all provide tools for exploring the vulnerable, uncomfortable and often surprising other side of education: the hidden, unconscious and unspoken desires that we invest in educational institutions and practices. This collection offers glimpses of this other side of education produced in empirical studies using a variety of methodological approaches: practice-based theoretical speculation, policy analysis, ethnography, interviews and free associative methods, as well as ideological critique of the field of critical educational practice and research. The book foregrounds political and unconscious aspects of investments in the fields of education and educational research.

The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor and Francis journals.

Before, after, in and beyond teacher education

H. James Garrett

The author uses a trip to a Holocaust museum to explain and illustrate psychoanalytic concepts from Freud to Lacan in order to re-imagine persistent dilemmas in teacher education. The author suggests that psychoanalytic vocabularies provide an additional and productive lens to conceptualize productive possibilities in teacher education.

Introduction

Teacher education programs attempt to address, confront, revisit, and refine student teachers’ pasts. The status of the past in teacher education is located in ‘the apprenticeship of observation’ (Lortie, 1975) as well as in the challenge of becoming conscious of one’s own ‘personal practical knowledge’ (Clandenin, 1986, cf. Korthagen, 2004). However, despite the broad agreement in teacher education upon the notion that the teacher’s past is significant, the complexities of subjectivity make it difficult to formulate interventions into the past that aid in the ability of student teachers to enact a creative pedagogy (Britzman, 2003a). Conceptual change is hard work. However, student teachers must come to an awareness of their past and the ways that their own narratives of schooling might impact the ways that they are experiencing their teacher education program and, perhaps even more importantly, how they are enacting the beginning phases of their teaching careers with diverse young learners.

Without recognition of these processes and this past, teachers run the risk of mistaking thoughtful practice with a reproduction of their own experiences of/in schools. It seems as though teachers are expected to begin on the first day of their teaching practice having come to terms with their past in ways that allow them to successfully facilitate the academic achievement of their students. It is, as one of my most recent students put it, ‘a mess.’ While there is significant variation in approaches to teacher education (see, e.g. Wilson, Rozelle, & Mikeska, 2011), there is one thing upon which most teacher educators agree: it is exceedingly difficult to change future teachers’ minds about what it means to theorize and practice the work of teaching. It is hard, in other words, to reconstitute or recast the past.

This paper places its focus on the status of the past in the pedagogy of teacher education and the degree to which that past is activated in the present. The theoretical constructs utilized herein follow curriculum theorists such as Pinar (2004) who have problematized the ways in which the past effects the present. Other scholars whose work takes psychoanalytic theory into the spaces of formal schooling have considered issues of the past as being always brought to bear in teaching and learning, always playing out within the psychical dynamics of classroom life (e.g. Britzman, 2006; Matthews, 2007; Taubman, 2006). In utilizing psychoanalytic theoretical constructs, the past will pester and prod the teacher and the student, but most frequently, those interventions will stay outside of the conscious awareness of the parties. It will, however, manifest itself in resentments, jokes, frustrations, and all sorts of unpredictable events in the classroom. Some will feel like they belong there, others will not. The past is active and present.

I will be conceptualizing the past in terms of the ways in which psychoanalytic theory provides a way of interpreting classroom life that allows for a focus on the strange and estranging in teaching, learning, and learning to teach. In this paper, I used two psychoanalytic constructs (the Lacanian notion of the symbolic register and the Freudian concept of ‘deferred knowledge,’ or nachträglichkeit), in order to investigate two persistent phenomenon in teacher education: the status and influence of the personal/social past and the ways in which that that past can be rewritten. To introduce and illustrate the ideas, I will focus on an experience I had with research participants at a Holocaust museum. This ‘other space’ of the museum will serve as a pedagogical location that I will then use as an analog for the formal spaces of teacher education. Following these illustrations, I will turn my attention to how those terms might allow teacher educators to think a new about persistent problems in teacher education.

Theory and context

It is important to highlight that what I write here is rooted in the very position(s) I occupy and assume in relationship to theory, scholarship and education. So, briefly, I am a white male of means, an assistant professor of social studies education at a large research university in the American South who utilizes psychoanalytic research to think about the ways in which social studies/teacher education can locate creative potentialities within a sociopolitical framework that is largely anti-intellectual and pro-capital (Pinar, 2004; Zizek, 2007). I utilize psychoanalytic theory to implicate the ways that knowledge is mediated and experienced by teachers and students as being in many ways outside of conscious awareness but already embedded in and shaped by larger personal/social systems of meaning. The psychoanalytic vocabulary here – though hoping to be provocative and generative – is not provided with the intention of being a cure-all. What I offer is a vocabulary that I find helps the subject tolerate the difficulties of working in the twenty-first century.

Using psychoanalytic theory to investigate the landscape of pedagogical encounters is something that allows for an examination of the things that initially do not make sense, do not fit, frustrate confound or perplex (e.g. Bibby, 2010; Britzman, 2009; Pitt, 1998). What the practice of psychoanalysis does for patients, in the best of cases, is to allow for a creative accommodation of problematic aspects of the past. It does not, in this sense, attempt to solve problems as much as it does help individuals to understand those problems in a variety of ways so that various conceptualizations may be drawn upon at various times to accommodate and reduce the accompanying anxieties. As it relates to teacher education, psychoanalytic inquiries may not offer the sets of strategies that we often desire (Farley, 2013), but what it might do is help us think about the nature of that desire as a lesson in and of itself. It may help us to think about the persistent kinds of questions that occur as being themselves the location of hopeful and creative interventions in the thinking of the student, the student/teacher, and the teacher educator (Farley, 2009; Tarc, 2011). Thinking about teacher education psychoanalytically, then, means an acknowledgement of the problems of resistant students as well as idealistic ones (and that idealism is also a form of resistance), a recognition that all sorts of things get in the way of our best efforts as teachers, which the past is always on our breath, and that this past is open, ultimately, to being reworked and contextualized – even though such work is difficult.

Context of inquiry

This paper analyzes and interprets a set of data to illustrate, theorize, and highlight implications for teacher education. It is not an empirical piece but is based on an empirical research project and its results. The larger study that gave rise to this museum visit focused on the ways in which social studies preservice teachers made sense of, and made pedagogical, encounters with ‘difficult knowledge’ (Britzman, 1998; Garrett, 2010, 2011; Pitt & Britzman, 2003). The six participants, four female (Lynne, Patty, Grace and Eva) and two male (Ben and George) – all middle to upper middle class white students in a large university’s teacher education program, were asked to join me at the museum. Before we entered, participants were asked to write about their thoughts in a journal. Participants and I then viewed the museum exhibitions, listened to the testimony of a Holocaust survivor who was speaking at the museum that day and then had an hour-long group discussion in one of the museum conference rooms. After the museum visit, I had participants provide me their journals and notes from the museum visit. Two weeks after the visit, I transcribed our discussion, and then sent them copies of the transcripts and their notes for further comments.

What became apparent as I read and re-read this particular data through a psychoanalytic lens was that many of the meanings generated in and around the Holocaust museum were populated by something that seemed beyond the individual as well as the topic of study. What was said was said ‘in’ the museum, but it was ‘of’ other places and times altogether. This particular paper is motivated by the degree to which that interpretation echoes within my work and thinking about teacher education: that what students say, how teachers react, what desires and fears are described in relation to teaching practice are all filled with something ‘other.’ That something other, I think, can be brought into a temporary focus by thinking with the Lacanian ‘symbolic register’ and the Freudian notion of ‘deferred knowledge.’

Introductions and illustrations in the museum

The symbolic register

Jacques Lacan’s contribution to psychoanalytic thinking is a re-reading of Freud’s structural model of psychic life and a lending of a poststructural read to it. His articulation of the unconscious is conceived around three ‘registers’: the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. Briefly (and over simply), the real is the one which cannot be accommodated into the thought structure or experience of an individual. It is, in many ways, representative of the prediscursive stimuli that a person may sense, but cannot perceive. Perceptions, then, are within the imaginary and once they approach and then are codified in language, they become part of the symbolic. The psyche, for Lacan, is located outside of the individual and is therefore subject to the sociopolitical discourses that circulate and dominate in any particular space. The symbolic register constrains, orients, and allows for certain kinds of sense making dependent upon one’s location in it. Much like a constellation imbues collections of individual stars with a given meaning, and it is populated with signifiers and is given its structure and logic in the relationships between those signifiers. Because of the ways that signifiers like teacher, student, classroom, school, clock, and others work together to form meanings, they stitch together a fabric that, as Lacan posits through his theorization of the symbolic field, predetermine possible articulations of experience. The result is that our conscious thoughts are often not the equivalent of our experiences in the world, they are those experiences mediated, shaped, and, at least in part, determined by our location in the symbolic field. That signifier (‘student’ or ‘teacher') provides a location in the symbolic field that subject will occupy and, as Lacan (2006):

illustrates determines subjects’ acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success and fate, regardless of their innate gifts and instruction, and irregardless of their character or sex and that everything pertaining to the psychological pregiven follows willy-nilly the signifier’s train, like weapons and baggage (p. 21).

To put the symbolic into familiar terms, I propose a simple (perhaps, oversimple) example. When I am subjectively located as a ‘student’ (a specific kind of subject position), I may want class to be over. I may pack my things. I may text a friend. I may read a newspaper on my computer. But I do not call class to an end. I do not even have access to a vocabulary that would call a class session to its end. Not only do I not have the authority to end class, the coordination of the symbolic field would likely influence my thinking to such a degree that I would not even think the thought of producing the utterance: ‘class dismissed.’ At that time, I literally am not in possession of those words. It would not even register as a possibility. As a student I do, think, and say particular things. As a teacher, though, I have access to, and am activated by a different situation in the symbolic. The texting, the packing up, and the open laptop computer would frustrate me. Those same actions that I just undertook as a student are, to put it in these terms, no longer available to me. I am, Lacan might say, being pulled through the symbolic chain. In the next section I will explain how those symbolic coordinations ‘worked’ in the context of the museum visit and, later, in terms of the given and possible in teacher education.

Using the symbolic to theorize the museum visit

One of the signifiers that research participants occupied outside of the Holocaust museum was one of ‘museum visitor.’ I invited students to write their thoughts in the area outside of the Holocaust museum before we entered. Here, I read those thoughts via Lacan as ‘being spoken’ by a particular location in the symbolic. For a first example, George (a white, upper middle class conservative male) wrote, ‘I have an idea of what to expect. I get ‘surprise emotional’ when I experience things like this, and I do my best to hold it in.’ Ben, who, like George, is a white, upper class male, included sentiments that are in some ways similar to George’s in that he asks: ‘Why do I immediately feel the need to turn the music down or off? (written about his drive to the memorial) I fear not being able to ‘measure up’ to the memory. The Holocaust is intimidating, and so this place is as well.’ Grace, a white middle class female wrote: ‘I expect to view a lot of the stories and exhibits through the lens of my own mother’s death, a death that was not as atrocious, but which taught me nonetheless about being separated prematurely from someone you love deeply.’

Of course, it could be argued that all people enter a space with expectations. I agree. However, the evidence of the symbolic coordination predetermining meanings is found in the excess of these written articulations. It is found in the uncanny, ironic, and cross-purposeful speech acts. When George writes that he has an idea of what to expect, and in the very next statement discusses his ‘surprise’ emotions, we are able to understand that because of the signifier ‘Holocaust museum visitor’ he is expecting certain experiences. The excess of his statement is that his surprise has already been structured for him. How can surprise work in advance?

Occupying the same position, Ben’s need to turn down the music is spoken through the social meanings that the Holocaust has taken over time – that there is certain music that is appropriate to such engagement, and there is other music which is not. And when Grace writes about the ways she expects to experience the exhibits through the lens of the death of her mother, it may at first seem that the signifier she is occupying is one of grief, the lost daughter, the separated. But she also does acknowledge the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: the death drive and education
• 1 Before, after, in and beyond teacher education
• 2 Interrupting the frame: reflective practice in the classroom and the consulting room
• 3 The significance of ‘participation’ as an educational ideal in education for sustainable development and health education in schools
• 4 Learning to fail and learning from failure - ideology at work in a mathematics classroom
• 5 An ideology critique of global citizenship education
• 6 Recognising desire: a psychosocial approach to understanding education policy implementation and effect
• 7 Psychical contexts of subjectivity and performative practices of remuneration: teaching assistants' narratives of work
• 8 Talkin’ ‘bout a revolution: the social, political, and fantasmatic logics of education policy
• 9 The sublime objects of education policy: quality, equity and ideology
• 10 The explosion of real time and the structural conditions of temporality in a society of control: durations and urgencies of academic research
• Index