Psychoanalysis and Education

Learning

Psychoanalysis and education have a long history of overlap and quarrel, but they both focus on human development. Many psychoanalysts were also trained in education, for example, Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Ernst Kris, and Erik Erikson. Similarly, educational writers such as John Dewey and William James studied works in psychoanalysis. More recently, educational thinkers such as Deborah Britzman, Alan Block, Alice Pitt, Sharon Todd, and Shoshanna Felman have applied ideas of psychoanalysis to educational theory and at the same time have offered ideas to psychoanalysis.

Anna Freud once claimed that teaching is “learning twice”; first one learns as one prepares for one's students, and then one learns from one's students as one teaches. Yet, the learning alluded to in this instance is not so much an anticipation of what the students will learn or think about; rather, it is more of a pedagogical disposition, in the sense that the double movement from the material to the potential created in the educational encounter implicates learners in their own learning.

Many educational objectives preoccupy themselves with the quick application of knowledge to the solution of problems. Psychoanalytic conceptions of learning, however, slow us down and ask us to look at the kinds of learning that might come before application.

[Page 623]This “other” type of learning that is often hidden by educational objectives often has more to do with confronting anxiety and exploring identity.

Another approach to learning from psychoanalysis accepts the perpetual “loss” endemic to educational practice, by which it is recognized that the teacher is always pursuing knowledge of her or his students, yet never actually obtaining it. The Western system of education is not designed to notice that learning occurs over time, or even that accidents, chance, and frustration may be as much the source of learning as the effects of learning, and may not even be obviously related to any specific actions on the part of an adult. In general, educators focus on what they can observe teachers doing.

Modern educational theory persists in placing the teacher at the center of education, despite a claim to student-centered learning. Such theory creates “blind spots” that shut out the serious work of the learner, ignore the serious mistakes that cannot be admitted or debated, conflicts that are central to the experiences of learning, and so on. Instead of a clear set of understandings about what makes “learning happen,” the result is a lot of defensiveness on the part of the adult, as if the work of learning is only an authentication of or an answer to the question of the adult's capacity to control, to predict, and to measure “progress.” A psychoanalytic perspective like this raises the paradoxes or contradictions between principles or conclusions that seem equally necessary and reasonable.

...