Psychoanalytic Theory

Learning and Psychoanalytic Thought

Learning is presented as the means to change not only what is in one's mind but the mind's structure. The mind's content, however is seen through a psychological prism, expressing, though displacement and condensation, the drives and idiomatic desire. Ideas are erotically linked to images, people, fantasy, fragments of lost events and relations, and to pieces of the body, all named “objects” or “imagos.” The ongoing problem of learning entails learning to live with others on the way to becoming an “I.” Education is presented as both needed and as subject to its own pathologies. Any learning is learning from uncertainty and conflict and therefore becomes the capacity to tolerate the mental pain of thinking from the unknowable and the incomplete. Yet this means that learning is inextricably tied to anxiety, a signal of danger that links the external and internal worlds. The interest is in moving from frustration to symbolization. Although this view of the human leans on what is tragic in the human condition, it is also concerned with what is beyond the tragic, namely processes that may bring one to a larger truth: creativity, imagination, aesthetics, and the desire for symbolization.

The primary concern is with the trauma of human suffering and its congealed expressions that animate problems within the demand for happiness and then reverberate in experiences of unhap-piness, melancholia, and mourning. It proposes that the human suffers from meaning through a series of developmental losses, all affecting the fantasized body: loss of the breast, the genitals, the other, one's own body. These losses the finite erotic human must suffer and then signify what these losses come to mean in relations of love, hate, knowledge, and how they seamlessly blend into work, sociality, and political life. Although the body and its oral, anal, phallic, and genital phases are the raw material of symbolization, these metaphorical phases coexist throughout life and are found in situations of aggression and fantasy expressed in behaviors such as stealing, hording, copying, name-calling, and more devastating orders of social destruction. Psychoanalytic theory emerges then from problems of eros in human understanding and misunderstanding and opens questions into the ways the external world is internalized and, too, how the internal world is externalized through both language and bodily symptoms. It asks the question, from where does misery come? Its theory addresses such issues as the human's enigmatic resources of existential life such as dreams, art, and music, to speculations on human development and its psychic life, to paradoxes of self/other relations, to that which resists or escapes the anchor of meaning, and then, onto questions of [Page 694]the theory itself: how its theory affects therapeutic action, or the transformations of both the theory and its subject. Its boundaries are as porous as the imagination.

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