Novel Education

These questions touch on the conflict of hermeneutics, the study of the interpretation of interpretation, or interpretation’s historicity. We mean something beyond what is said, what is said means more than we know, and excess returns to unsettle meaning. In his study of Freud, Ricoeur (1970) suggests two disparate functions of the psychoanalytic interpretation: An interpretation may restore meaning and be made to destroy illusions that are also meaning. Yet how does one tell the difference if the case study may be working at both levels and if the very nature of narrative requires and involves this double action? There also emerged the question of (and what some in the workshop saw as) the analyst’s “flights of fantasy”—wild associations taken through the playground of theory and the audience’s transference. How different can the analyst’s understanding be from the analysand’s own understanding? And would this difference be then seen as either reparative or destructive? Second thoughts on these matters may bring us to the literary problem of representing the work of affect. Here we encounter the noncoincidence of experience to the vicissitudes of its meanings. Here, too, we may glimpse a remarkable, runaway, affected subjectivity. Perhaps the case is that when writing, reading, or listening to the case study, there is no such thing as innocent bystanders; we find ourselves on the side of otherness, the affect.

When we read between its lines and listen for how we are affected by the case study’s theory of learning and not learning, clinical writing alters its purpose. Yet it is precisely in this excess of meaning that loyalties divide. Is the psychoanalytic case study on the side of empiricism and its proof, merely recording what happened? Or, is there an aesthetic, therapeutic consideration that structures both the work and its writing and so therefore presents the excess of what the analytic event cannot contain? What would it mean for a case study to be a study of its own affected divide? Can the case study be affected by the literary qualities of both the subjective world and the act of representing it again in writing? And, if we claim we are writing novels, must that cancel the question of the truth effects of psychoanalysis or even destroy what it can mean to generalize processes of psychical life as now posing an interminable, unruly human condition?

What can fiction mean in the helping professions? I bring this question to many of my current learning situations: university professor of education, researcher, candidate in a psychoanalytic institute, analysand, and in my clinical practice as therapist. The studies of learning and not learning gathered here represent my uneasy dialogue between the clinic of education and the clinic of psychoanalysis. Throughout this book, I put pressure on education with psychoanalytic views but also press psychoanalysis to express its theories of learning. I pose these disparate contexts as clinics because they are rare places the mind may take refuge. They can be places to freely wonder over the purpose of both reparation and destruction. They are clinics in the sense that strangers meet to affect ideas and each other. Allowing these sites their fictions, that is, their alienation from taken-for-granted sense—allowing these sites their adventure and disappointment with meaning and their anxieties over significance not yet reached, but still demanding form—creates a transitional space for subjectivity to be without justification, to be an improper study. These are the needed conditions for psychological significance to be risked and for thinking to be made anew.

An underlying question that brings these chapters together begins not with what is novel about education but rather with what a novel education is like. This question invites comparative efforts across the human professions and the humanities, but it also turns on a particular dilemma of how knowing self/other relations affect the nature of the relation, with how, through an interest in psychical reality, object relations, and the literary, knowledge is expressed and its history enlivened. It turns out that there is a literary school concerned with education. Good and bad novels of education are carried out through the genre of the bildungsroman; there bringing up culture prepares the lines for the plot of bringing up of a life. Obstacles will come in the form of characters but also will be the condition for subjective events to affect our narrator. In this literary genre, the narrators, usually at first unwittingly, come to arrange arbitrary life into lessons on learning to live. These are novels of affected psychology and affected education; they may be read as narratives on the passions of learning and not learning but also as points of entry into understanding the work of trying to know the self and the Other. These novels play between the lines of making fiction from life and making life from fiction. How different is this from what we do in learning, from gathering our objects, obstacles, and events to sketch the studies for representing—taking note of—our own novel education?

The gathering of objections, now from the vantage of self-alienation and creation will take us into a study of an ego defense known as “identification with the aggressor,” the topic of Chapter Three. This chapter stages conflicts in learning and not learning within the inner world of object relations and the external world of identity politics. Here, fiction gains the momentum of identification, attracted to the emotional situations of love and hate. The painful fiction concerns what the ego will do to sustain a needed relationship that does not satisfy, and that takes the ego into conditions of oppressive love. The pleasurable fiction is that aggression may well be one way the ego sets itself loose from the confines of compliance to make its own demands. The chapter has a further purpose in that this psychoanalytic concept has migrated into discussions of postcoloniality and anti-racist pedagogy, used there as a lens to consider self/other relations. At times, when brought to social theory, we are apt to disengage this ego defense from its relation to phantasy. The place of the unconscious will also make agency insecure. As with most psychoanalytic language, the concept of “identification with the aggressor” I argue, cannot be understood as an explanatory device, but can be used to imagine mundane development as involving tenderness, passion, aggression, and alienation.

Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight continue with the theme of being affected by representing the felt experiences of learning and not learning. Chapter Six analyzes two disturbances of memory and problems in recollection. The first disturbance is contained in a birthday greeting Freud wrote to the author Romain Rolland. The second falls under the auspices of how the problem of teaching fiction turned out to be a story of destruction. The teacher’s memory is disturbed when narrating a story of trying to remember learning to teach. Chapter Seven takes a different view of disturbances, with notes on the teacher’s depression. There, I consider the fictions that defend against encountering the teacher’s illness. I arrange this chapter as a series of notes to convey something of the chaos of representing illness and to suggest the incompleteness of my sketches. I draw upon psychoanalytic discussions of the analyst’s education, and the idea that the analyst’s education invites the analyst’s madness that is already there. What can it mean for education to contain the teacher’s madness when the teacher’s history of education may be a part of the story of illness? Fiction appears differently in this chapter through Freud’s idea of the transference in the analytic setting and how, as an artificial illness, it may be interpreted. I suggest that the term “teacher burn out” is cover for the teacher’s depression, but also that illness—rather than be confined to the discourse of attributes—can be conceived as a substitute to a missing or broken relation. Objections to conceptualizing the teacher’s illness come from many sources, including the profession of education.