Freudian Thought

The concept of education—its dangers and promises and its illusions and revelations—is elaborated throughout Sigmund Freud's (1856–1939) great corpus of 24 volumes on studies of psychoanalysis. Known in English as The Standard Edition (1886–1940), Freud's clinical and theoretical writing represents the human through its lifelong controversies in learning to live: as vacillating between the demands of fantasy and reality; as an internally divided, erotic, finite creature; as unconsciously affected by its infantile history of helplessness and dependency; as an amalgam and expression of group psychology and its conflicted, intersubjective design; and as suffering from both meaning and its absence or loss. Given the conflicted nature of the human, Freudian thought focuses on the limitations of cognition with the translation of the dynamic unconscious into speech, desire, and perception. The psychoanalytic curriculum study of education, then, refers to our emotional attitudes toward knowledge and our own otherness.

The Standard Edition contains Freud's clinical case studies; theory and technique papers; general lectures; commentary on war, trauma, emotional suffering, and death; analysis of dreams, art, literature, and the imagination; writings on sexuality, the family, and the drive to know; and speculations on the formative structures of Eros (the drive of unity) and Thanatos (the drive of destruction) in sexuality and mass psychology. These volumes are the curriculum of psychoanalysis and serve the psychoanalyst's didactic education. The work of Anna Freud (1885–1982), along with her students, Erik Erikson and Peter Blos, the British School of Object Relations led by Melanie Klein (1882–1960), and the work of Bruno Betttelheim in reading and affects, for example, have influenced the progressive curriculum of teacher education, educational psychology, and the design of literacy education. All of these theorists consider learning as a problem of imagination, creativity, freedom, symbolization, and the capacity to tolerate their intrinsic frustrations.

Freudian thought represents the mind through its psychical agencies, a metapsychology of the unconscious (the id), the ego (the I), and the superego (the super I). The dynamics, or movement, of psyche and soma are described and treated as emerging from early caregiving, as experiences of reality and fantasy, and as composing wishes, anxieties, and defenses. This approach gives to curriculum studies the following questions: What [Page 385]holds together and what breaks apart the emotional, social, cultural, and political world of the learner? What is the role of the other in self-constitution? What happens to knowledge if the human is considered as conflicted, as creative in its dream world, as organized through the pleasure and unpleasure principles, and as affected by unconscious forces he or she knows nothing about? What role does the past play as it is transferred to present relations of authority and knowledge? What is the relation between sexuality and thinking? And what becomes of the afterlife of unresolved conflict in relation to how we attach to or dissociate from ideas, other people, and modes of self-perception and presentation?

At least five affective dimensions of curriculum studies can be identified with Freudian thought: conflicts with the child's sexual theories and gendered development; scenes of the child's and teacher's theories of reality, history, and fantasy; problems of education as a moral force; tensions in sublimating instinctual aggression and the pleasure principle; and contradictions education gives to psychoanalytic thought. In each dimension, Freudian thought proposes the qualities of education as an asymmetrical human relation made from love and hate, as creating psychical consequences beyond the conscious and willful efforts and intentions of everyone involved, and as experience with the uncertainty of meaning.

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