Disavowed Knowledge

Psychoanalysis, Education, and Teaching

Peter Maas Taubman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136815782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This is the first and only book to detail the history of the century-long relationship between education and psychoanalysis. Relying on primary and secondary sources, it provides not only a historical context but also a psychoanalytically informed analysis. In considering what it means to think about teaching from a psychoanalytic perspective and in reviewing the various approaches to and theories about teaching and curriculum that have been informed by psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, Taubman uses the concept of disavowal and focuses on the effects of disavowed knowledge within both psychoanalysis and education and on the relationship between them. Tracing three historical periods of the waxing and waning of the medical/therapeutic and emancipatory projects of psychoanalysis and education, the thrust of the book is for psychoanalysis and education to come together as an emancipatory project. Supplementing the recent work of educational scholars using psychoanalytic concepts to understand teaching, education, and schooling, it works to articulate the stranded histories ? the history of what could have been and might still be in the relationship between psychoanalysis and education.

1

INTRODUCTION

A Troubled Relationship

The relation between education and psychoanalytic treatment
will probably before long be the subject for a detailed investigation.

(Freud, 1925b, p. 274)

Forty two years ago, in an article entitled “Psychoanalysis and Education,” written for The School Review, Bruno Bettelheim (1969) described the relationship between education and psychoanalysis as having been from the beginning “neurotic.” Comparing the relationship to a marriage, in which communication had broken down and the partners respectfully ignored one another, the offspring, he wrote, resembled “a bastard child…too sickly to thrive, too schizophrenic to realize the inner split that ails them” (p. 73). It’s quite an image—a frozen marriage, illegitimate children, psychosis. Could such a persistently troubled relationship really have had a future? Especially one outside the normative arrangements presupposed by Bettelheim’s analogy? If we consider the relationship between education and psychoanalysis from today’s standpoint, we might well conclude that its future was indeed bleak.

With the exception of a few departments in the humanities, psychoanalysis in the United States has been banished from the academy, its disturbing knowledge disavowed. As a form of treatment, psychoanalysis increasingly looks to the pharmaceutical industry and cognitive behavioral therapies to treat the psyche. The inner life of the patient or client frequently appears as scripts that can be re-written or as chemical configurations that can be adjusted. In the field of education, other than in the small field of curriculum theory, psychoanalysis exerts no influence. Its absence is particularly glaring in teacher education and in educational policy, where the learning sciences, neoliberal agendas, and business models determine the dominant approaches to education and provide the terms to describe teaching and curriculum. Those terms and approaches replace the inner lives of teachers and students with behavioral techniques and quantifiable outcomes. Ignored or disparaged are the very theories constitutive of psychoanalysis, theories that work on the border between the socio/cultural and the intrapsychic, that explore the mysteries of subjectivity, and that can illuminate the dreams, desires, ideals, and terrors that shape our understanding of education.

It is, indeed, a dismal state of affairs, especially given the auspicious beginning of the relationship announced by Freud’s honored presence at Clark University in 1909 and the initial embrace of psychoanalytic ideas by early progressive educators. How did a relationship that Freud considered “so rich in hopes for the future” (1933a, p. 146) deteriorate into what it is today? Was it ever really feasible? If Bettelheim was right and the relationship has always been neurotic, and if neurosis suggests the compulsive repetition of a repressed history, its acting out rather than its working through, how, we might ask, could the reconstruction of that history interrupt that compulsion? And, how might knowing the history of the relationship allow us to think differently about our work as educators, particularly in an age when various educational agendas, such as the professionalization agenda, the social justice agenda, and the de-regulation agenda (Zeichner, 2003, p. 491), seem increasingly to ignore the teacher’s and the student’s subjectivity and with it the unconscious? These are the questions around which I have organized this book.

It seemed to me that if we were to gain any insight into the current relationship between education and psychoanalysis and especially if we were to imagine a future for that relationship, we would need to understand its history. It also became clear to me that if we were to envision a future for teaching that was more than job training and test preparation disguised as educational reform, the reconstruction of the history of that relationship might offer alternatives to the dominant educational culture of “teaching by numbers” (Taubman, 2009).

In good psychoanalytic fashion, I have tried to move into the past of these two “impossible professions,” as Freud so often called them (1925b, p. 273; 1937b, p. 248). I have done so to get a sense of what troubled their relationship, to imagine a different relationship, and to try to bring forth from that reconstructed history the basis for a new rhetoric for teaching and education, one not caught in the vicious cycle in which education has been trapped for over a century.

Offering a straight, linear history of the relationship, while necessary, seemed, however, contradictory to or perhaps a defense against the unsettling presence of the unconscious. The unconscious led Freud to label psychoanalysis and education impossible professions, since its unheimliche proximity and intimate alterity, as well as its eruptions, resist and disrupt the closure, transparency, and causal narratives that education and psychoanalysis often pursue. Not only do the enigmatic workings of the unconscious create unexpected shifts and unanticipated feelings in the relationships between patient and analyst and between students and teachers, but they make a shambles of efforts to predict and to control, two projects that many educators and psychoanalysts have made priorities in today’s culture of measurable outcomes and accountability. The unconscious also interrupts or complicates any straightforward historical narrative of the relationship between education and psychoanalysis, unless of course, one has already disavowed the disturbing knowledge of and from the unconscious. How then to proceed?

Reconstructing a History

In reconstructing the history of their relationship, I have combined a psychoanalytic approach with an historical one. I have sought to explore the disavowed knowledge within both psychoanalysis and education and its effects on their relationship. But in piecing together the history of the troubled relationship between education and psychoanalysis, I deemed it important to include, from a psychoanalytic perspective, not only the odd twists and turns of that relationship but also my own relationship to both professions and the ways these two professions resonated with my own family dramas. All too often those who write about education and psychoanalysis ignore their own psychic investments and autobiographically overdetermined involvement in their work, but as psychoanalysis insists, those investments, one’s family, and the intimate dead, however irrelevant they may seem to one’s scholarship, are always pressing close. Certainly they have shaped this work. My father was a doctor of Jewish, German-Austrian descent and was a professor of medicine. My mother was a high school teacher whose background was Protestant. Both my parents, like Freud and like, at least sometimes, public education, practiced a secular humanism. While my father’s and mother’s religious and professional backgrounds were tied respectively to the “Jewish science” of psychoanalysis and to the predominantly Christian teaching force, I was never sure which parent would resonate at any given time with which profession, and thus how my own affective histories would inflect the approaches I took to psychoanalysis and education and their relationship.

At certain periods in the twentieth century psychoanalysts took on the more stereotypic masculine role, exhibiting a paternalistic concern for teachers, as they informed teachers of what was in teachers’ and their students’ best interests. At other times educators seemed to occupy that role, as they rejected psychoanalysis for its unscientific theories and irrational ramblings. My parents’ own roles in the house often interrupted more normalized arrangements; my father, for example, did dishes, my mother acted as both disciplinarian and confidant. Both acted as my teachers. While Bettleheim may have assumed particular gender roles in his metaphorical marriage between education and psychoanalysis, the history of the relationship subverted that assumption.

If, as psychoanalysis suggests, any relationship is infused with labile sexualities, genders, and libidinal currents, then the relationship between education and psychoanalysis was no different. While women analysts were prominent in the early days of the psychoanalytic movement, their numbers dwindled by the 1940s with the increasing medicalization and institutionalization of the profession and its normalization of a nuclear domesticity. Teachers, we know, have usually been women, except in the academy, where men have dominated. Men in both professions, however, have struggled at times with fears of being seen as feminized or as homosexual. Sherwood Anderson’s (1983) character Wing Biddlebaum, in the story “Hands,” and the popular caricature of the egghead professor exemplify the feminized teacher and the homosexual panic that haunts education. Paradoxically, Freud, himself, suggested to the members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910, a time when education was often still single sexed, that problems in education were “connected with the growing proscription of homosexuality” (my italics) at the time, because “in suppressing the practice of homosexuality, one has simply suppressed the homosexual direction of human feeling that is so necessary for our society” (Nunberg and Federn, 1910, p. 324). As recorded in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society’s minutes, Freud stated the “best teachers are the real homosexuals” (Nunberg and Federn, 1910, p. 324). We don’t know why Freud made such a claim – it is the only time he did – but we can speculate. Certainly, he argued for the polymorphous nature of libidinal life. At various times he claimed that the severe repression or rigidly narrow channeling of our erotic plasticity could stunt emotional life, and that the acknowledgment of our libidinal interests in the same sex expanded our psychic capacity. We might even venture that his erotic draw at that time to Ferenczi and Jung, described by Saul Rosenzweig and George Protchnik in their detailed histories of Freud’s trip to the United States, provoked such thinking. Or perhaps, too, he was suggesting that the loosening of rigid sexual definitions would increase teachers’ and, for that matter, analysts’ ability to more fully relate to their students and patients. But this very dissolution of normative definitions and the diffusion of sexuality into myriad ways of relating may well have posed a threat to Freud’s colleagues, even to Freud himself. Indeed, perhaps out of their own panic, psychoanalysts quickly supplanted Freud’s tentative acceptance of and even valuing of homosexuality with an intensified pathologizing of it. Freud’s comments do raise questions, though, about the libidinized and labile gender relations implicit between and within both psychoanalysis and education.

As I explored the history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and education, and began to see my parents and the two professions as metonymical for one another, I wondered if their relationships held similarities. Was I the troubled offspring Bettelheim had talked about? How did I hold the split to which he referred? I have been a teacher for many years, was involved in analysis for a long time, and now found myself writing about the relationship between the two. My parents never appeared to have had difficulty understanding one another, although I knew they had. In fact, my own unconscious desire to return to familial history may have contributed to my curiosity about why, at different points, psychoanalysis and education had such a difficult time communicating. So, in part, my reconstruction of the history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and education cannot be disassociated from my own history, including the history of my own sexual and gender identifications. I wanted to take account of this personal history and weave it, however lightly, into the chapters in this book, but I have also worked to present a more traditional history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and education.

In reconstructing the history of that relationship, I have tried to attend to the failed experiments, the dreams, and the symptoms that litter the history of their relationship. In doing so I wanted to see if there was another history that lay within and that might hold another future for the relationship and for how we think about teaching and education.

Extant Histories on the Relationship between Psychoanalysis and Education

As I began this project and turned to the existing historical work on the relationship between education and psychoanalysis, I found few secondary sources. Given how many histories there are of American education and of psychoanalysis, as both progressed in the United States, it struck me as odd that so few scholars had attended to the historical relationship between the two professions. There were, however, exceptions. Deborah Britzman’s (1998, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2010) groundbreaking work on psychoanalysis and education has revealed the complicated relationship between these two impossible professions. In several books she has explored how the work of August Aichhorn, Siegfried Bernfeld, Anna Freud, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, Melanie Klein, and, of course, Freud influenced and was integrated into American education. She has articulated that history, not by focusing on it directly, but by thinking psychoanalysis and education together. Thus her work exemplifies how the split between and within these two professions might look when, if not repaired, then at least thought through.

A few other writers have begun to reclaim the lost history of the relationship. Sol Cohen (1979, 1983) has written about the influence of psychoanalysis on the American mental hygiene movement, as well as about as the impact on progressive education in the United States of psychoanalytically informed progressive schools in Europe in the early twentieth century. Stephen Petrina’s (2004, 2006) efforts to complicate simplistic histories of the mental hygiene movement, and the place of psychoanalysis in teacher education offer some insight into the relationship, as does Bertram Cohler’s (1989) shorter historical essay on psychoanalysis and school learning. A large body of work on the mental hygiene movement in the United States does exist and sheds some light on the relationship between psychoanalysis and education, but more often focuses on the public policy implications of the movement and its social conservatism (Jones, K., 1999; Richardson, 1989), or in some cases its liberal bias (de Forest, 2006, 2007).

Other than these scholars’ work, I could not find any secondary accounts of the history of the relationship. My efforts to reconstruct that history were therefore based on primary sources, the few extant secondary sources on the relationship, and several histories that treat education and psychoanalysis separately. That there is so little extant work in this area suggests the extent to which psychoanalysis has been banished from schools and departments of education, and its troubling knowledge disavowed in the academy.

Disavowed Knowledge

As I began to piece together the history of the relationship between education and psychoanalysis, I came to attribute much of the difficulty in their relationship to the disavowal of the very thing that, according to Freud, made them impossible—the unconscious and its effects—and in part to the resulting inner split within both professions, a split Bettelheim, perhaps unconsciously, alluded to in his analogy, when he referred to “the inner split that ails them.” That split, I argue in Chapter 2, has resulted in and been between two projects central to both education and psychoanalysis.

To describe this split I relied in part on Eli Zaretsky’s (2004) description of the “dual character” (p. 4) of psychoanalysis. For Zaretsky psychoanalysis has had an emancipatory dimension as well as a repressive dimension. I shy away from such a judgment and instead see the split within psychoanalysis, as well as education, as between two projects, one of which, following Zaretsky, I label the emancipatory project. The other project I label the therapeutic project. The therapeutic project has as its goal cure—cure of illness and cure of ignorance. Such a project, which has historically been the main focus of both psychoanalysis and education, strives to help the patient or the student, who are placed at the center of all the professions’ efforts, reach particular goals: for the patient freedom from stasis or suffering and for the student a change in behavior, attitude, or what he or she knows. The criterion by which the theories and practices of the therapeutic project are measured is their use value in the clinical setting, be it office or classroom, and in bringing forth demonstrable positive change in either patient or student. Within such a project teachers or analysts frequently aspire to scientific certainty, so that they can control and even predict the effects of their practices aimed at helping patient and student achieve set and demonstrable standards of health, normalcy, political rectitude, and/or disciplinary knowledge and specified skills. Perhaps the purest form of such a project would be the medical model of psychoanalysis or teaching, which relies on protocols, clearly measurable outcomes, and experimentally proven treatments and practices. But even those educators or analysts who reject the medical model share some version of such a project, whether they are committed, for example, to assuring students become aware of specific social inequities or learn a core curriculum or whether they help patients change their life script, learn new behaviors, or gain insight that leads to a demonstrable or subjectively felt change in the patient’s psychic state.

The emancipatory project, on the other hand, works toward deepening and helping us understand and articulate our inner lives without promising the result will be a happier, more beautiful, or more just life or a better job or a better relationship or a higher test score. The emancipatory project eschews efforts at control and cure, offering questions and an interminable analysis, rather than answers and solutions. Such a project never assumes it knows in advance what is best for the patient or student or what the outcomes of its endeavors will be. At the center of its efforts, the project places the teacher and analyst alongside the student and patient. It does so because the teacher and analyst know the student or patient only through the teacher’s and analyst’s own idiosyncratic subjectivities and through a relationship fraught with unconscious desires and shadows from the past. Thus, the teacher’s and analyst’s own desires must be acknowledged and taken into account. Such a project finds its voice in literature, particularly poetry, and the arts, since, as Deborah Britzman (2006) has pointed out, these carry affective knowledge without assuming to know its meaning in advance. The emancipatory project cherishes a kind of understanding for understanding’s sake, a suspension on the part of teacher and analyst of immediate judgment to be replaced by curiosity, attunement, analysis, and a focus on creating conditions such that the patient or student can generate material for further elaboration or analysis. Perhaps most important, the emancipatory project asks teacher, analyst, patient, and student to recognize their own psychic complicity in what they claim to know and what they ignore. Echoes of the emancipatory project can be heard in Frank McCourt’s student’s comments recounted in McCourt’s Teacher Man (2005). The student exclaims about McCourt’s classroom, “In this class you never know what you’re supposed to know” (p. 253). Or, to take another example, psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s (1993) belief that “the emotional truth of a session has no psychological locus at all,” that “[n]o starting or ending point can be envisioned for it [because] it is always evolving” (Eigen, 1993, p. 130) suggests the emancipatory project.

While both projects are related, often in undisclosed ways, and while they blur in the hurly-burly world of the classroom, they do have different trajectories. Many educators, and I certainly include myself, feel committed to, as well as torn between, aspects of these two projects. We want to project a curriculum that ushers students into the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as we interpret these, as well as the useful, but we resist a set curriculum’s standardization and the fixed pedagogical protocols that neglect students’ uniqueness, agency, and idiosyncrasies, and that overlook the press of contextual factors, and the palpable ebbs and flows of classroom life. We want to advocate for particular pedagogical practices, but we resist turning them into recipes that ignore teachers’ and students’ subjectivities, particularly the vicissitudes of the unconscious. On the other hand, while we cherish the unpredictable and spontaneous, strive to attune to our own desires and those of each student, and don’t want to impose an instrumentalized control, we worry about the very loss of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Disavowed Knowledge
• 3. Beginnings: 1909 to World War II
• 4. Psychoanalysis and Education in Post World War II America: World War II to 1968
• 5. Psychoanalysis and Education: 1968 to the Present
• 6. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• INDEX