Psychoanalysis and Education

Minding a Gap

Alan Bainbridge, Linden West, Alan Bainbridge, Linden West

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367101091
• eBook ISBN: 9780429917691
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides a unique and highly topical application of psychoanalytic theory to the broad context of education, including schools, universities, and adult learning. Education is understood as a crucial element in a lifelong project to gain more coherent and meaningful understanding of self and others. Psychoanalysis has taken the contingency, construction, and development of human subjectivity, as well as the difficulty of thinking, to be its prime preoccupation. Yet - at a time of increasing doubt and anxiety about the purposes and practice of education - psychoanalytic understanding, from various traditions, has never been more marginal in educational debate. The book seeks, in these terms, to bridge some of this gap: it is written for teachers, trainers, policy-makers, clinicians, researchers, and diverse academics who want to look beyond bland superficialities to deeper struggles for self and understanding. This includes unconscious processes in the relationships that constitue education as well as resistance to new ideas and practices.

Chapter One

Introduction: minding a gap

Alan Bainbridge and Linden West

Starting points

In December 2009, diverse educators, psychotherapists, and others from the UK, Scandinavia, France, Italy, Turkey, South America, and Australia met at a conference held in Canterbury Christ Church University. The focus was to engage in discussing the applications of psychoanalysis, broadly defined, to education, in its widest sense, including adult and lifelong learning and higher education as well as schooling. This book originates from what, in retrospect, can be seen as a significant conference, and seeks to capture the complex, often messy, and yet potentially liberating world of education. Such a project, to connect these two worlds, was not novel, yet it should be noted that recent academic texts related to this broad area can be counted in tens rather than hundreds (e.g., Appel, 1999; Bibby, 2011; Britzman, 2009; Salzberger-Wittenberg, Williams, & Osborne, 1983; Youell, 2006). It is also clear, from a UK perspective at least, perhaps more widely, that psychoanalytic thought has had relatively minimal impact, especially in recent years, on education and the wider education-focused academy. Indeed, this book will present evidence of increasing hostility from many educators and academics towards its claims, aspirations, and ways of knowing.

Such tendencies can be considered as part of a wider cultural marginalisation of psychoanalysis, at least in its classical guise: some 150 years after Freud’s birth, it is often seen as fair game for criticism, with questions constantly asked of its early basic assumptions, most famously drive theory or penis envy. Today’s zeitgeist seems to be moving in a different direction, away from any such intense personal preoccupation with the past, as the critical theorist Honneth (2009) has noted, towards managing the unpredictability of the present. Moreover, psychoanalysis is often framed by its critics as if its core interpretative repertoire has remained fixed since the time of Freud. In fact, modern psychoanalytic theory can bear little relation to what is most often criticised (such as its alleged neglect of the socio-cultural in processes of becoming human), but this does not seem to inhibit detractors (Hunt & West, 2006).

The situation in other European countries, such as France, in regard to psychoanalysis and education, might be marginally better: a number of faculties of educational science in universities provide psychoanalytically informed “clinical” workshops, in “a Balint style”, which focus on the experience of professionals, including the role of unconscious processes (like the transference and countertransference) in locations such as the classroom. This clinical tradition of intense focus on such processes has generated a body of associated research, using, for instance, in-depth observational methods, derived from the work of Esther Bick as well as intensive group discussion and writing (Chaussecourte, 2009). There is an interest in what is termed the psychic qualities of relationships between teachers and students, but also in the relationships of everyone to academic subjects themselves. This includes how subjects, such as maths, are taught, and how this has changed, bringing, for some teachers, feelings of loss, even trauma, as their ways of understanding and communicating the roots of their discipline are declared anachronistic. Teachers, in turn, can act out with their pupils, in cynical and even destructive ways.

Yet, despite a body of research and writing (under the umbrella of the electronic journal Cliopsy (www.revue.cliopsy.fr), for instance), French academic educators such as Claudine Blanchard-Laville and Philippe Chaussecourte at Paris Ouest Nanterre University, and Bernard Pechberty at Université Paris 5, René Descartes, consider themselves to be increasingly marginal in the educational sciences. However, from our perspective in the UK, arguably at least, the connection between education and psychoanalysis, in France and some other continental European countries, remains stronger. This might be to do with the greater willingness in some continental academic traditions to engage, philosophically, with what, through Anglo-Saxon eyes, can be dismissed as highly speculative, unobservable, and empirically untestable supposition. In Germany, for instance, the German Educational Research Association, unlike its British Educational Research Association counterpart (BERA), has a psychoanalytic interest group (Section 13.1: Psychoanalysis and Education).

Notwithstanding, however, the position overall, if to varying degrees, across many countries and cultures is one in which psychoanalysis has become more marginal in educational literatures. Those institutions in the UK, such as the Tavistock Clinic in London, that offer opportunities to engage with the emotional factors in learning and teaching, from a psychoanalytic perspective, might be struggling to recruit teachers and others to their programmes, at least as reported in discussions at the Conference. This is an era where cognitive– behavioural approaches have become dominant, given, so the argument might proceed, that they take less time for people to engage with, are cheaper to provide as a therapy, and might be relatively easily applied to education (given the dominance of cognitively framed perceptions of learning). They are also more conducive to measurement, however questionable some of the research and reductive of complex psychic causalities and interior life, this might be (Leader, 2011).

Our book results from growing concern about these trends and a desire to bring education and psychoanalysis into renewed dialogue: not least because the latter, we believe, can illuminate the messiness, muddle, and ambivalence that education is always and inevitably heir to. And, crucially, it can illuminate more of what it means to be a person and a learner: not least the idea that “the human is always a divided, inwardly ruptured being”, yet one “who has the ability to reduce or even overcome that rupturedness through its own reflective activity” (Honneth, 2009, p. 127). Rupture, in this view, is a product of the repression of desire consequent on our absolute dependence on the (m)other for survival, as it is an aspect of loss in processes of separation both in earliest and also subsequent experience. For Britzman (2009), how the infant negotiates this rupture, represents the fundamental process of education, one that remains with us across the lifespan.

The aspiration to build dialogue is, of course, nothing new: many early pioneers in psychoanalytic thinking considered that it offered essential perspectives for making sense of education and personhood. Anna Freud (1930) and Sigmund Freud (1925f) both wrote about education, and Anna was a teacher and educational pioneer. In 1908, Ferenczi presented a paper (later published in 1949) on the relationship between psychoanalysis and education at the 1st International Congress of Psychoanalysis. Klein (1975) explored the child’s “epistemophilic instinct” in the acquisition or avoidance of knowledge. Building on this, Bion (1962) articulated a model of learning based on the qualities of interaction, what he termed reverie, between (m)other and baby in the early stages of their relationship, where a baby’s capacity for thinking is a product of the mother’s ability to thoughtfully process the former’s confused thoughts and feelings and to feed these back in digestible ways. Being able to think and learn is, thus, rooted in early relationships and their capacity for the containment of anxiety. Eric Erikson trained as a psychoanalyst and worked with young people in educational settings (Friedman, 1999), and Aichhorn (1951) worked closely with the ideas of Anna Freud to establish centres for problem youth. It could also be argued that the essential roles of education and psychoanalysis are similar, in that each seeks to bring the individual into an understanding of their worlds and selves, to enable more thoughtful, life-enhancing decisions to be made. However, the similarities of focus notwithstanding, the two worlds have drifted apart; and the status of psychoanalytic perspectives has diminished.

We need to make clear that psychoanalysis, like education, is a broad church, as the chapters make clear. And the success of the CCCU conference might indicate a growing desire to reclaim a space in which the dynamic unconscious—which retains a central place in most theorising—can be thought about and better understood. Significantly, the conference has already been a catalyst for a number of developments, aside from the present book: this includes a major collaboration between Canterbury Christ Church University and colleagues in the Faculty of Education Sciences at Paris Ouest Nanterre University. A special edition of the French online journal Cliopsy has been produced (Revue Electronique, 6, October, 2011: www.revue. cliopsy.fr), as have various articles comparing research into qualities of psychic and transitional space in varied educational settings (West, 2010; see also this volume). We both serve on the scientific committee of Cliopsy, while Linden has been Visiting Professor at Nanterre, and there is now collaboration in doctoral student supervision and assessment.

Lifelong education

We should also make clear that our perspective on education is both lifelong and life-wide. In fact, we were worried about this in planning the conference and in preparing the book: the hegemonic language of education tends, still, to be synonymous with schools and schooling, despite the growing importance of learning as a lifelong imperative. This was partly driven, in Linden’s case, by a background of research in adult learning with a focus on transitional processes in higher education, professional life, and informal learning, derived from careful chronicling and systematic understanding of learners’ perspectives, using biographical narrative research methods. Such preoccupations can be marginal in mainstream educational literature, driven as this might be by the dominant agenda of schools: schooling, instruction, and assessment of formal learning (Bainbridge, 2012; Merrill & West, 2009; West, 1996, 2001, 2007). We wanted to use the book to engage with education in the broadest terms, without neglecting the central, if problematic, role of schools. We wanted to encompass learning and educational processes in families, in relationships, in social, community, and professional contexts, at work as well as in higher education. Defining education broadly, we thought, might help loosen up and energise discussion on its fundamental characteristics and purposes, not least by making reference to a psychoanalytically informed research literature on adult and lifelong learning. This can bring into sharp relief some of the damage that schools and schooling can do, but also, importantly, how reparation is possible, and why, despite the most disturbed of childhoods.

Psychoanalytic assumptions, broadly applied, push us towards addressing many difficult questions, beyond a narrowly obsessive focus on “standards”, curricula, measurable outcomes, or, for that matter, childhood; not least in a “runaway” globalising world, where inherited and familial templates can become rapidly redundant and where composing a coherent and meaningful biography becomes a perpetual reflexive challenge (Giddens, 1999). We are both psychoanalytic psychotherapists, and have found that the insights of psychoanalysis have evoked new possibilities in our research and teaching. They have enabled us to appreciate the complexity of experience—for adults, young people, and children—and of selves struggling to be, and to view education as far more than a rational exercise of mind, but, rather, a deeply embodied process, alive with the play of phantasy, desire, and resistance, new and older ways of knowing, across lives. Psychoanalysis, broadly defined, has encouraged us to delve beneath surface appearances, and to challenge overly sanitised, emotionally deadened, and ultimately unsustainable accounts of learning, to build richer, deeper, whole person understandings, redolent with vulnerability, but also resilience in “keeping on keeping on”, whether as a teacher, young person, or adult learner.

Minding gaps

Clearly, we have wondered about how and why a gap between psychoanalysis and education, in its broadest sense, has become so wide and what might be done about it. The phrase “minding a gap” is borrowed from an important book by Frosh (1989), which addressed another gulf, that between mainstream psychology and psychoanalysis. He argued that this was also to be regretted, and in analogous ways. If psychoanalysis had something to learn from mainstream psychology, in terms of clarity of ideas, acknowledging the power and complexity of cognitive processes, and methodological stringency, psychology had, Frosh insisted, more to learn from psychoanalysis.

Psychology had become, in its mainstream variants, overly concerned with what might be termed the “syntax” of human behaviour, establishing general rules and principles underlining this, to the neglect of “semantics” and the meaning of actions to people themselves. One example of syntactical-level explanation is Piaget’s structures of knowledge, operative at various developmental stages from the sensorimotor to preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational intelligence, as a person develops from infancy to adulthood. Piaget, however, is interested here in understanding how certain cognitive abilities arise, and “the histories which he provides are histories of concepts rather than people” (Frosh, 1989, p. 87). In fact, within psychology, at one extreme, under the current seductive influence of neuropsychology, there can be a view that “no mental level needs to be considered: it is the physiological processes of the brain that are the real causal entities. Psychology, at least in principle, reduces to neuroanatomy and brain chemistry” (ibid., p. 22). We lose completely any notion here of the experiencing individual, or any imperative to engage with the world of meaning and subjectivity.

Yet, advances made in generating models of mental functioning, from observations of brain activities, as Frosh notes in some detail, need not be done at the expense of chronicling and understanding subjectivity and of the meanings of personhood, including reflexive struggles to break free of historic and compulsive constraints. Such models, if not, leave important epistemological gaps. Frosh poses a question as to why a particular Jack might have hit a specific Jill to make this point: such an action cannot be reduced to neurones firing in particular ways, provoking movement in an arm. We need rather more by way of explanation, a point we return to in our final chapter. Suffice it to say, for now, that psychoanalysis asks relevant “semantic” questions: of the meaning of actions, of their subjective significance and intention, and of the position they hold in and across a person’s life. We create a different level and quality of understanding as to Jack and his actions. Mainstream psychology has striven to establish rules, the validity of which are judged by directly observable and measurable evidence and the ability to generalise, while psychoanalysis has been more preoccupied with meaning, and with chronicling and understanding the particularities of experience. Mainstream psychology has sometimes, in fact, eschewed any scientific interest in the workings of the internal world, which, as Frosh argues, might have diminished potentially rich dialogue within the discipline.

Like mainstream psychology, education might just be losing more than psychoanalysis, from any gap between them. The conception of learning in education—shaped by psychologically orientated social and cognitive learning theories, in the main—has been more focused on the acquisition and development of cognitive structures, rather than on relationships, emotionality, experiences, and meanings of selfhood. Any consideration of the emotions, let alone the unconscious, has been more marginal (Greenhalgh, 1994; Illeris, 2007). It is interesting, in this context, to note how models such as Bloom’s taxonomies (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1964) are widely used by practitioners and academics in discussions of teaching and learning. However, it is significant that the usage is almost exclusively focused on Bloom’s work in the cognitive domain: little attention is paid to his two other domains of learning: the affective and the psychomotor, which he identified as equally crucial.

The historical dominance of an isolated, even disembodied, cognition might have been strengthened by heated debates within the psychoanalytic community itself (see Britzman’s (2003) discussion), where, historically, different schools have existed, sometimes in open hostility to one another. For whatever reason, the loss of influence, in contemporary educational discourse, of a dynamic, person-centred, subjectivist understanding of education is to be regretted. Not least, in helping teachers and learners to understand more of why education can be so troubling. Freud (1925f) was aware that education was not easy to experience, because it continuously threatened the coherence of self. Selves might feel unstable, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About The Editors And Contributors
• Editors’ Notes And Acknowledgements
• CHAPTER ONE Introduction:minding a gap
• CHAPTER TWO To think or not to think: a phenomenological and psychoanalytic perspective on experience, thinking, and creativity
• CHAPTER THREE Anxiety, psychoanalysis, and reinvigorating education
• CHAPTER FOUR A psychoanalytically orientated clinical approach in education science
• CHAPTER FIVE Zohar’s late arrival: a clinical analysis of teaching practice
• CHAPTER SIX Margot’s red shoes: when psychic reality challenges teaching
• CHAPTER SEVEN IWhite cliffs, white horses: on playing and auto/biography
• CHAPTER EIGHT Teacher’s countertransference reconsidered
• CHAPTER NINE Prequels and sequels: a psychoanalytic understanding of developing a professional practice in an education setting
• CHAPTER TEN Border country: using psychodynamic ideas in teaching and research
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Training teachers: psychoanalytical issues in the teacher–student relationship
• CHAPTER TWELVE Learning through the emotions: experience-based learning for psychologists
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN Continua: Mentally Ill Artist Students Uninterrupted
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN Transformative Learning: A Passage Through The Liminal Zone
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Dynamics Of Student Identity: The Threats From Neo-liberal Models And The Benefits Of A Relational Pedagogy
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN Bridging Gaps
• INDEX