The Learning Relationship

Psychoanalytic Thinking in Education

Biddy Youell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781855752276
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921285
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book offers a psychoanalytic perspective on learning and teaching and on many of the issues which preoccupy those who work in educational the origins of learning in children's early relationships and at factors which help and hinder the educational process in later childhood and adolescence. Amongst the topics addressed in the book are the significance of play and playfulness, the impact of change, separation, times of transition, bereavement, bullying and racism. The author has aimed to set well-established psychoanalytic ideas about lear of current educational practice and to look at the teacher's experience alongside that of the students.

CHAPTER ONE
"Where do babies come from?" What makes children want to learn?

Hamish Canham

In this chapter, I want to consider what are the fundamental questions for those involved in the education of children and adolescents. What facilitates learning, and what hinders it? To what extent are difficulties in learning emotionally determined, and to what extent are they caused by external circumstances? Why do children find some subjects harder to learn than others? And the central question I want to address is—what makes children want to learn in the first place?

Difficulties in learning and thinking are central preoccupations for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as for teachers. Melanie Klein’s earliest publications were about children’s difficulties in school and with learning, reading, and writing. Psychotherapists are interested in difficulties in learning and thinking because the ability to think about oneself and to learn from experience are crucial in the development of the personality and in the ability to make use of psychoanalytic treatment.

In the novel Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens seems to be illustrating contrasting ways of learning (Canham & Youell, 2000). Mr M’Choakumchild and Mr Gradgrind teach a system of learning based on “facts” and the accumulation of knowledge in which the role of imagination or “fancy” is subordinated to the dry, meaningless repetition by rote of the external characteristics of objects. Sissy Jupe breathes life into learning through a meaningful, personal connection to the subject by using her mind and having independence of thought. The distinction that Dickens is making in the extract below would seem to correspond to that made by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1962), between “learning from experience” and “learning about”—a difference between amassing information “about” a subject without a genuine emotional link to what is being studied. It is the capacity to learn from experience with which I am primarily concerned here.

In Hard Times, Mr Gradgrind begins by outlining his educational philosophy to the schoolmaster, Mr M’Choakumchild, and then demonstrates it to the class:

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!”

“Now, let me ask you girls and boys, would you paper a room with representations of horses?” After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, “Yes, Sir!” Upon which the other half—seeing in the gentleman’s face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus.

“No, Sir!”—as the custom is in these examinations.

“Of course, No. Why wouldn’t you?”

A pause. One corpulent, slow boy with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, Because he wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would paint it. “You must paper it,” said Thomas Gradgrind, “whether you like it or not. Don’t tell us you wouldn’t paper it. What do you mean, boy?”

“I’ll explain to you then,” said the gentleman, after another and dismal pause, “why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact? Do you?” “Yes, Sir!” from one half. “No, Sir!” from the other.

This stifling of imagination and conviction that there is a right way to view the world is, of course, represented in Mr M’Choakumchild’s and Mr Gradgrind’s names. Sissy—or Cecilia, as Mr Gradgrind calls her—has another view of things:

There being a general conviction by this time that “No, Sir!” was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes; among them Sissy Jupe. “Girl number twenty,” said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge. Sissy blushed, and stood up. “So you would carpet your room—or your husband’s room if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you,” said the gentleman. “Why would you?” “If you please, Sir, I am very fond of flowers,” returned the girl. “And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them in heavy boots?” “It wouldn’t hurt them, Sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, Sir. They would be pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant and I would fancy—”

“Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,” cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. “That’s it! You are never to fancy.”

“You are not, Cecilia Jupe,” Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, “to do anything of that kind.”

I do not want to suggest that there is no place for facts and figures—and, indeed, for latency-age (primary school) children, acquiring this kind of knowledge serves important functions. But it is the capacity to learn from experience—the development in children of the ability to use their minds and to think and feel—that will help prepare them for life, and what I am referring to when I am talking about “learning”.

Psychoanalytic theories of learning— the epistemophilic instinct

In her 1931 paper, “A Contribution to the Theory of Intellectual Inhibition”, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein proposed that every child is born with a desire to find out about the world, and she calls this “the epistemophilic instinct”. In the earliest stages of life, she felt that this curiosity is focused on the mother and what is going on inside her. With time the scope of the child’s curiosity grows to include other family members and the nature and quality of the relationship between these people and the mother. This initial interest in close family members gradually is turned towards the wider world and is the basis for the desire to learn.

I want to come later to the part played by the parents and other family members in fostering a desire to learn, and begin with the problem of the epistemophilic instinct—that children and adults may not like what they find out or innately know. There is a lifelong struggle with which we are all faced, about what we can bear to learn and to know about. A tension between a desire to find out, and a desire not to know the truth. There is a problem at the heart of learning. New knowledge, or the acceptance of what we already know to be the truth deep down, often arouses angry opposition. As Britton (1992) writes, “It [new knowledge] arouses our hostility, threatens our security, challenges our claims to omniscience, reveals our ignorance and sense of helplessness and releases our latent hatred of all things new or foreign” (p. 38).

This was quite literally the case when Galileo claimed that the earth went round the sun, rather than vice versa. At the time he was forced to retract his claims, as it was felt by the religious and political figures of the time that to accept this heliocentric theory would completely undermine the structure upon which their world and domination of it was built—that God had created the universe and the solar system and that the earth and God’s appointed representatives—the pope, the cardinals, the monarchy—were at the centre of it. I do think that it is important to bear in mind the kind of primitive reaction that new knowledge stirs up and to try to find ways of introducing ideas so that they can be heard and thought about rather than defended against and rejected as a consequence. Emily Dickinson’s poem “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (1868) captures the nature of this dilemma:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too fright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind

In thinking about this problem, I have found the ideas of the psychoanalyst Roger Money-Kyrle particularly helpful. In his papers “Cognitive Development” (1968) and “The Aim of Psychoanalysis” (1971), he argues that there are three key facts of life and that the acceptance or disavowal of these enhances or impedes our ability to learn (see also Steiner, 1993, for a discussion of Money-Kyrle’s idea). The first of these three facts of life is what he calls “the recognition of the breast as a supremely good object”. This is his way of expressing the fact that, as babies, we are utterly dependent for survival on being looked after by someone else—generally our mothers. Without the care and attention of another person, a baby will very soon die.

The implications for this in the classroom are many. Children who cannot accept being dependent on someone outside themselves for survival are likely to have problems in accepting that they need the teacher’s help to learn. They might present in class as children who cannot learn because they know it already, or who secretly take in what the teacher is saying without acknowledging where the learning is coming from. It is a type of learning that manifests itself in plagiarism—where the true originator of an idea is not acknowledged—or as a kind of “scavenging learning”, as Meltzer and Harris (1986) call it, where a person puts together work by picking up bits and pieces from various sources and putting them together as if they were his or her own ideas. Accepting this fact of life is closely related to a child’s disposition—whether he is able to tolerate frustration and gratefully take in what he is given, or whether he feels such envy of his mother’s capacity to look after him and then of the teacher’s capacities and knowledge that he attacks what is on offer.

The second of Money-Kyrle’s facts of life is “the recognition of the parents’ intercourse as a supremely creative act”. In this way, Money-Kyrle introduces the centrality of the relationship between parents to mental life—the problems of the Oedipus complex. Melanie Klein thought that our ability to learn about the world and ourselves has its roots in the way a child discovers and approaches the nature of the relationship between parents and that many difficulties with learning in general follow on from difficulties in learning about the Oedipus situation. Seamus Heaney’s poem Death of a Naturalist (1966) can, I think, be read as a description of a little boy’s desire to find out about how babies are made and of the fine line between an ordinary curiosity about where babies come from and an intrusive interest that is more about taking over and controlling.

Death of a Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the darn gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads fluting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

The boy in the poem seems to have become frightened about what he has done—how he might have intruded into the parental intercourse by taking away the babies in the form of tadpoles. He seems to fear that the parents (the frogs) would want to attack him in return. The title of the poem, Death of a Naturalist, suggests that as an area of study, the natural world—perhaps biology in particular—has, as a result of the intrusiveness with which he has approached it, lost its interest for him and become something to be run away from instead.

I think there is often a more subtle turning away from recognizing this fact—that our parents have had a sexual relationship from which we are excluded. The widespread fantasy that many adults and children have at some point that they have been adopted and are in fact the lost offspring of royalty (what Freud, 1909c, called a “family romance”) is one example. You can see how the evasion of knowing this fact of life can have implications for learning in the classroom. Most obviously, difficulties in learning about biology may be rooted in this. But so, too, might be difficulties in other subject areas like maths. Although this might seem like an unlikely jump, the connection was illustrated to me by a 6-year-old patient of mine whom I shall call Anna.

This girl’s parents, while both involved in her upbringing, separated soon after the birth of her younger sibling. They remain close and are thinking of getting back together again. In the session I am going to describe, for the first time in about a year both parents had brought her together for her session. Usually the mother brought the girl for her sessions, occasionally the father.

Anna comes into the room and she begins drawing faces on a piece of paper. She first draws her face, then mine, then her father’s, then her sister’s. Finally she draws her mother’s face. It is as far away from her father’s as it is possible to be on the paper, and it is also drawn very small indeed. All the other faces are drawn in the space between her mother’s and father’s. Anna then draws arrows linking everybody, all possible relationships except that between her mother and father. I talk to Anna about how difficult she seems to find it to think of her mother and father being together, and both bringing her for her session today. I point out that in fact she seems to want to keep them apart, as she has drawn them on opposite sides of the paper, and they are the only people not joined by arrows. Anna then decides to do some maths, which she has begun to learn about at school. She gets another piece of paper and writes out some sums for herself, 1 + 46, and writes the answer = 46. The next sum is 10 + 18, and the answer she writes is 18.

So one can see how Anna’s difficulties with seeing her parents together means she has similar difficulties with her maths. She can only see half of the sum. Bringing together 1 and 46, or 10 and 18, means allowing her parents to have a relationship with one another and to come together in her mind. In this example, there is an interplay of external and internal factors that makes it hard for Anna to see her parents as a couple. They are in reality separated, but in her mind she separates them further. I have given more space to this fact of life and called this paper “Where Do Babies Come From?” because of the central role that negotiating the Oedipus complex has in relation to the development of the personality and the ability to learn.

The third and last of Money-Kyrle’s facts of life is “the recognition of the inevitability of time, and ultimately death”. Recognition of this fact is connected very much to the experience of weaning, as the prototype for all subsequent losses. As Steiner (1993) comments:

It is connected with the recognition of the fact that all good things have to come to an end, and it is precisely this fact that access to the breast cannot go on forever that makes us aware of the reality of its existence in the external world. [p. 99]

In the classroom, this may manifest itself as a difficulty with supply teachers or in moving from one subject or classroom to another. It may mean a difficulty with accepting the reality of time, which means that children or teenagers hand in homework late or do not leave sufficient time for getting it done or for exam revision. The origin of all these linked difficulties can be said to lie in an evasion of the reality that time is limited. It is perhaps most pronounced as a state of mind developmentally in adolescence, when there can be a sense that time is theirs to play with endlessly. However, as Eliot Jaques (1965) has pointed out in his paper “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis”, the inevitability of death is something that needs to be revisited, particularly in middle age, in order to ensure the continued development of the character and capacity for work and love.

These facts of life can serve as both as a spur or obstacle to learning and, more often, as an oscillating combination of the two in which the desire to face reality and know the truth vies with the part of the personality that does not want to know. However, which character aspect, or part of the personality, holds sway for the majority of time will be determined not just by the individual character endowment of the child, but by the experience of learning in the earliest mother–infant and family–infant interactions.

Learning in infancy

Extending the theories of Klein, Bion (1962) put forward a model of learning based on the pattern of interaction between mother and baby in the earliest stages of the relationship. He suggested that when babies are very small, they need substantial help from their mothers in thinking about and making sense of their experiences of the world. If a baby has an experience of an adult who can “contain” the primitive anxieties communicated by their babies, he has the experience of being thought about. If this experience is a relatively consistent one, then when he needs to think for himself he is likely to be able to draw on the me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• SERIES EDITOR'S PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Introduction
• 1 "Where do babies come from?" What makes children want to learn?
• 2 A theoretical overview: an introduction to psychoanalytic concepts and their application
• 3 Play, playfulness, and learning
• 4 Latency
• 5 Adolescence
• 6 Beginnings, endings, and times of transition
• 7 Understanding behaviour: insight in the classroom and the value of observation
• 8 Special educational needs
• 9 Group dynamics in school
• 10 Projective processes: gangs, bullying, and racism
• 11 Families and schools
• 12 Assessment, evaluation, and inspection
• 13 Inclusion, exclusion, and self-exclusion
• REFERENCES
• INDEX