The Creative Self

Psychoanalysis, Teaching and Learning in the Classroom

Tamara Bibby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317991649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

The Creative Self engages with the work of the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott to develop alternative ways of thinking about key issues at the heart of pedagogy; specifically pedagogic relationships, creativity, defiance and compliance. These issues underpin the desires and defences of professionals located in educational institutions, such as the desire to know what is best, to know how to reach all learners, normalised expectations of behaviours and outcomes, and sometimes challenging engagements with students and the curriculum.

Each chapter provides both a theoretical focus and illustrative demonstrations of the ways in which Winnicott's theories may be relocated and used productively as tools for professional and academic reflexivity. By building extensively on Winnicott's understanding of the ways in which relationships facilitate (or hinder) the development of the self, this book extends his clinical focus on parental and analytical relationships to think about the ways in which the pedagogic relationship can provide an environment in which people may (or may fail to) develop as learners.

This approach provides powerful ways of thinking about pedagogy and pedagogic relationships that stand apart from the cognitive and rationalist tradition. This focus can be used constructively to support people working in educational settings to re-establish a sense of personal and professional autonomy in an environment recently typified by compliance. The Creative Self is an engaging and innovative read appealing to postgraduate students, teachers, researchers and academics with a desire for a new analytic lens through which to explore the educational experiences of both learners and teachers in schools, colleges and universities.

1
INTRODUCTION

The writing of this book has been a drawn-out process. It has unintentionally spanned a hiatus in my own life, a hiatus that is interesting in terms of the subject matter I deal with here. As someone who has spent most of her life in educational institutions – as a pupil, as a student and as a teacher and lecturer – and as I leave that life and meet new people, the question of education takes on new hues, and I find myself wondering again about this business. What is this thing, this process we call education? What is it for? Is ‘it’ a singular thing or a plural thing? Should we talk rather of ‘educations’? How does it/do they relate to ‘schooling’? or ‘training’? To what extent is education an event or a process? Is there a moment when we become ‘educated’? What do we mean when we identify individuals as educated: ‘He is an educated man’? or indeed, ‘He is an uneducated man’?

An important, but often overlooked, question to ask when thinking about schools is ‘what do we want education to achieve?’ This is a complex question requiring complex answers. Part of an answer might include the idea that we want education to enable people to continue learning throughout their lives. Under current policy regimes in countries such as the UK, the USA and Australia, this idea is paid lip service, but it is not always clear whether ‘lifelong learning’ can mean any more than ‘be prepared to do courses to facilitate changes of career in an unstable jobs market’: we have to hope it can! If we aspire to continue learning and having more than a utilitarian meaning of ‘education’, then what might it be? And how can compulsory education hope to create the personal qualities and skills needed to enable people to keep themselves learning? Because not all learning takes place in formal contexts, this surely involves much more than attending schools, colleges and universities.

For some (like myself), the business of being a student seems never-ending. I have always liked learning new things. Well, some new things. I am currently learning to run, and I am not at all sure that I like that! But education is full of transition and exit points: new ages and new phases of education, new institutions, new expectations. Is education essentially the same or different after these transitions? And what about education in or after employment? What about ‘lifelong learning’? The developmental story that accompanies education implies ‘growing up’ and differences – I am no longer 5 years old, how can education be the same when I am 15? Or 25? Or 55? Or 75? Yet, part of the purpose of this book is to challenge this storyline and to suggest that there is a timelessness to the business of learning about and learning to be. I want to notice and explore the effects of conflating education with growing up, or educatedness with maturity. Such conflations create many difficulties for schools and teachers at all phases, difficulties that lie at the heart of this book and will be explored in later chapters.

A nub of this book is that all learning is creative. All learning (beyond rote memorisation) requires a willingness to keep an open mind, a preparedness to keep being surprised, a capacity to hold onto curiosity and sense of wonder, a desire to keep asking questions. This goes far beyond utilitarian notions that we need to be prepared to keep learning so that we can pass exams or undertake professional development to retrain or develop our professional portfolios; we may indeed need to do all of those things, but there is far more at stake. The suggestion I want to make is that these qualities – of openness, wonder, curiosity, questing and their like – are central to mental health or well-being and that the contexts for learning expand far beyond the walls of the formal institution.

In an effort to define ‘health’, Winnicott said:

Let us say that in health a man or woman is able to reach towards an identification with society without too great a loss of individual or personal impulse. … [But] the life of a healthy individual is characterised by fears, conflicting feelings, doubts, frustrations, as much as by the positive features. The main thing is that the man or woman feels he or she is living his or her own life, taking responsibility for action or inaction, and able to take credit or blame for failure.

(1967, pp.26–27 emphasis in original)

This statement may surprise. Winnicott suggests that ‘health’ (what we might now tend to call ‘wellness’) includes a capacity to tolerate emotional pain or discomfort. The idealisation of ‘ease’ and its conflation with wellness troubles much of our modern life, yet Winnicott removes the impossible expectation that if we are ‘well’, we are only and always happy. Dis-ease is part of health, life is not ‘easy’. There is so much more to be learned than a mandated curriculum if we are to learn about and tolerate our own creativity, our own learning processes. I suggest that a capacity to engage in learning implies not only that we know what we need to do to progress through the education system or to further our careers, but also – and more importantly – that we can recognise and respond to our own desires. While we might expect that such recognition would be easy, it is often not: ‘I want to write but feel I have nothing to say’; ‘I want to travel but am not sure where I might go or what I would do there’. In a more practical vein, the difficulties some people have stepping aside from work at retirement or moving on from redundancy offer concrete examples of the very real difficulties that can be experienced when we try to locate our own desires and identify what we want – particularly after busy (compliant) working lives.

So, how do we come into being as subjects, as people able to know ourselves and (even some of) our desires? How do we learn to make contact with those desires and what might get in the way of that? What role does the environment (mother, home, teacher, classroom, school, society) play in our becomingness? The way Winnicott understood developmental processes was in terms of a movement in the infant from dependence to independence. Adam Phillips has highlighted the fact that we tend to operate with restricted, linear and concrete understandings of ‘growing up’. He contrasts this limited sense with Winnicott’s more generous understanding. Growing up, Phillips points out, has become a rush to rationality, independence and (self-) control …

[a] necessary flight from inarticulacy; from the less affectively ordered self, a self without its best behaviours to be on, a self that suffers and enjoys at a pitch that the grown-ups often find daunting. … But if we describe development as not merely or simply the acquisition of linguistic – and therefore moral – competence, we may be better able to nurture in children the necessary to and fro between the inarticulate and the articulate selves: a to and fro that might be sustainable throughout life rather than having its last gasp during adolescence.

(Phillips, 1998, pp.48–49)

Here, Phillips is hinting at a problem with the ideas of development and linear growth that schools take as a given. Schools are structured around ‘growing up’: children change year (and often teacher) annually; they move to primary school in latency and secondary schools at adolescence. Transitions from nursery to primary and again from primary to secondary schools are often talked of as moving to ‘big school’. Similarly, graduation from compulsory education is taken as the beginning of adulthood; although the edges are blurry, within a year or two of leaving school young people begin to gain access to full membership of society and legal responsibilities: work, marriage, voting, joining the army, taxation, etc. These linear ‘growning ups’ sit alongside chronological time enabling our institutions to function smoothly but, do we really ‘grow up’ so smoothly? Teachers are often frustrated that children appear to ‘forget everything over the long summer holidays’, secondary school teachers complain that primary teachers ‘don’t teach children anything’, and children leave school ‘ill prepared for the world of work’. Clearly, all is not as smooth and straightforward as the developmental story would suggest. There is something looping and recursive about learning. Jerome Bruner’s (1960) ‘spiral curriculum’ and the need to revisit topics come as a relief as we add caveats to complicate notions of development (perhaps to the point where the coherence of the story is lost). The difficulties with developmental narratives and linear growth are explored in a little more detail below and are a continuing theme of this book.

Teaching and education

This book begins from a belief that teaching – and therefore learning and education – is fundamentally about relationships: relationships with people, those who teach us, those we learn from, our families and peers; relationships with the knowledge they embody and share, their passions; and relationships with our own growing (or diminishing) sense of ourselves as knowers and not knowers. Elsewhere (Bibby, 2009) I have argued that how we come to know anything – from how to roast a chicken to reading and mathematics – is intimately bound to the contexts and particularly the people in which and with whom we do that learning. Even apparently independent learning is shaped by those we have internalised and who have helped us form our tastes, our passions, our ways of thinking and engaging with the world.

So, I begin from an acceptance that we are relational beings, that we are constituted in, and exist through, relationships: relationships with people, ideas and our surroundings. More than this, we are profoundly susceptible to others; they exert an uncanny influence upon us. For Freud, this is what it meant to be human.

[P]sycho-analysis has taught us that the individual’s emotional attitudes to other people, which are of such extreme importance to his later behaviour, are already established at an unexpectedly early age. The nature and quality of the human child’s relations to people of his own and the opposite sex have already been laid down in the first six years of his life. He may afterwards develop and transform them in certain directions, but he can no longer get rid of them. The people to whom he is in this way fixed are his parents and his brothers and sisters. All those whom he gets to know later become substitute figures for these first objects of his feelings. (We should perhaps add to his parents any other people, such as nurses, who cared for him in his infancy.) […] His later acquaintances are thus obliged to take over a kind of emotional heritage; they encounter sympathies and antipathies to the production of which they themselves have contributed little. All of his later choices of friendship and love follow upon the basis of the memory-traces left behind by these first prototypes.

(Freud, 1931, p.242)

Here, Freud is pointing out that the unconscious ambivalence we feel towards our parents, our siblings and other members of our immediate family – our passionate, contradictory and mercurial loves and hates – are visited on others, just as theirs are visited upon us. This is not something we can wish away or completely control, it just is. As a primary school teacher, it was not unknown for children to call me ‘Mum’ or ‘Gran’ (depending on who they were living at home with) and, if they caught themselves, to be immediately embarrassed. Perhaps we have all had moments of having to remind ourselves that someone is not our father, not our mother, not our sister or brother, that we do not always have to respond – with anger, fury, depression, love, envy, however – as if they were.

We are not born blank; we bring instincts and needs to our first relationship, and as soon as we are born, those instincts, needs and reactions are being given back to us: they are named, tamed and shaped. These actions and reactions, needs, and desires and our understandings of how these are responded to, these are the building-blocks from which our sense of self is formed and sculpted. As we progress through life, that initial template shapes our later interactions. Our desires, our ways of being and ways of relating, develop, grow and shift over time, but any changes that are made are to that early template. While tastes and proclivities develop over time, making changes to these or to the shape of our fundamental desires is less easy, so while radical changes can perhaps be made, this is never an easy process. Our relationships to ourselves, to people in the past and present, to people in the world and people in our minds, and to knowledge are central to who we are. And, if we are teachers, relationships are central to our professional lives as well.

If we accept that relationships and relationality are central concerns of learning and teaching, then how best can we think about them? Which ideas and theories are the most productive when considering the relational nature of work in education contexts? How can I think about how I conduct myself as an educator and how I seek to engage – or perhaps to re-engage – people with the ideas, knowledge and ways of working that it is my business to share? Traditional advice to teachers on relationships has never felt very helpful: not smiling until Christmas, maintaining zero-tolerance policies with regard to non-compliance, leaving ‘myself’ at the school gates, following three-step escalations of punishment (or reward). In fact, such advice seems designed to minimise (or even deny) the need to recognise and think about the very relationships that are at the heart of learning and teaching: is selective relationality desirable or possible? And is it ever possible to engage people with ideas without fully engaging oneself?

For Winnicott, the self is forged in relationship with a primary carer. His focus in the first instance is on the last weeks of pregnancy and the first few weeks of infancy, and so he always talked about the primary carer as mother. His suggestion was that where the primary carer was the father (or someone else) at this stage, they are acting as mother. For Winnicott (1971), the ‘father’ cannot exist for the infant until it is able to recognise and tolerate the existence of not-me objects. His famous suggestion that ‘there is no such thing as a baby’ (1964) speaks to this understanding that the baby is always in relationship; part of a pair. We might wonder, is this also true for the learner? We might wonder: does a learner exist without a teacher? Even (or especially) if the teacher is in the mind? A teacher without a learner? This book uses the work of D.W. Winnicott and others to explore different ways of acknowledging and working with and within pedagogic relationships. The people whose work I will draw on are primarily psychoanalysts, which perhaps raises immediate questions: Why aren’t I just drawing on ‘regular’ psychology? What has psychoanalysis got to do with teaching? What is psychoanalysis anyway? Is it okay to use these theories to think about classrooms?¹ And, why Winnicott?

Why not ‘regular’ psychology?

Traditional (cognitive) psychology is highly invested in its beginnings in science. There is typically a strong concern to follow scientific methods and to treat the human condition as susceptible to rational, scientific efforts. While there is much that this approach to the human mind and human behaviour can and does tell us, there is also much that it cannot. A common complaint against cognitive and rational beliefs about human life is that they treat people like other objects in the natural world: as knowable, measurable and predictable. But people cannot necessarily be measured in the same way as inanimate objects: Is IQ a fact of life or an artefact of our desire to measure intelligence as if it were a fixed and stable entity? Does measuring the density of granite affect its existence beyond that measurement in the way that measuring IQ affects a student’s subsequent opportunities?

However that may be, ‘regular’ psychology, scientific psychology if you prefer, is very familiar to educators. Indeed, developmental psychology shapes much of what is done in schools and nurseries. It also sets limits on our idea of childhood, of what is ‘normal’ and of human development more broadly. All of the ideas that make up ‘regular’ and developmental psychology (see, for example, Moore, 2000) – from Piaget’s stages of learning though Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, and on to the work of more recent theorists like Engstrom and Bruner – have come to be accepted as a kind of common sense. Developmental psychology’s ‘truths’ about children and childhood have been annealed in the fires of custom and practice until they pass unnoticed as common sense.

Scientific psychology appeals to our adult desires for rationality, control, order and predictability, and in meeting those needs, the more familiar forms of psychology have been very successful. But we need to ask ourselves questions about this taken-for-granted status and to reveal what psychology can blind us to. Much has been written about the difficulties with developmental psychology, about the ways the discourses it mobilises come to produce the very child it seeks to enumerate and describe (see, for example, Walkerdine, 1984, 1986; Burman, 1994). It is not my intention to rehearse those critiques here, although I recommend them to anyone working in education. But I do want to notice some of the particular difficulties that developmentalism can bring: its tendencies to normalise an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Things that go right
• PART II Things that go wrong
• PART III Working it through
• Index