NOTES
NOTES CHAPTER ONE 1. My phrasing, where interpretation was, there education shall become, is a play on Freud’s (1933) hope for the work of psychoanalysis: “Where id was, there the ego shall be” (80). In his early lectures, Freud (1915a) warns his audience that education can sustain illusions and even defend against the capacity to think. My rephrasing begins with the idea that the interpretation of knowledge is just the beginning material for the possibility of becoming a participant in one’s education, and that after the experience of education, there is still the problem of thought. (See also note 7 of this chapter for additional discussion of Freud’s phrasing.) 2. The misinterpretation of after-education is found in Freud’s (1905a) early discussion “On Psychotherapy.” At that time, Freud took great pains to separate psychoanalysis from hypnotic treatment. That early essay offers a series of rules about who is suitable for treatment, how old one should be, and which problems psychoanalysis can adequately address. Almost all of these rules were discarded except for the emphasis on analyzing resistance to cure. At this point, after-education was mistranslated as re-education. This association returns Freud to the problem of suggestibility, for re-education has a brainwashing ring to it: Psycho-analytic treatment may in general be conceived of as such a re-education in overcoming internal resistances. Re-education of this kind is, however, in no respect more necessary to nervous patients than in regard to the mental element in their sexual life. For no where else have civilization and education done so much harm as in this field, and this is the point, as experience will show you, at which to look for those aetiologies of the neurosis that are amenable to influence; for the other aetiological factor, the constitutional component, consists of something fixed and unalterable. (267) 171 172 AFTER-EDUCATION The editors of the Standard Edition also note this mistranslation again in Freud’s (1925c) preface to August Aichhorn’s study, Wayward Youth. And yet there is a sense that psychoanalysis is a re-education, a concept stressed in Freud’s (1915b) early introductory lectures, where he rehearses the public’s objections to psychoanalysis and situates some of their resistance to their education: “Thus society makes what is disagreeable into what is untrue” (23). I thank Susanna Luhmann for her discussion of Nacherziehung (aftereducation ). 3. Marion Milner’s (1996) talk to teachers, under the title, “1942: The Child’s Capacity for Doubt,” is perhaps one of the most explicit discussions on the importance of doubting to creativity and to resisting not only forces of conformity but even anti-democratic events in education. 4. Anna Freud’s (1930) characterization of education as all forms of interference is first offered in “Four Lectures on Psychoanalysis for Teachers and Parents .” Melanie Klein never defines education explicitly, although her early theories emerged from analyzing children’s phobias of school and learning. She was always interested in the problem of what invokes the work of thinking and what she views as the work of love, or the desire for reparation. But because these processes are still affected by what comes before them, namely, anxiety, aggression, sadism, and so on, education, for Klein, is never complete or positive. Also see Kristeva (2001b). I discuss Klein’s views on anxiety and reparation in chapter 5. 5. The term phantasy refers to unconscious processes and is therefore distinguished from such flights of imagination as daydreams, fantasy play, and games of “let’s pretend.” Hinshelwood’s (1991) entry in his dictionary of Kleinian thought offers some provocative images of phantasy as “worried constructions” children experience as they try to understand sexuality, and as “mental representations of biological instincts” (33). For Klein, phantasy is an expression of primal anxiety; it is a borderline concept that allows for the relation between the mind and the body to be thought, but it also is a concept that allows for the development of thinking itself. Phantasies represent, in Hinshelwood’s terms, “a small bellicose society of relationships with objects” (38). Anna Freud’s earliest paper, “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams” (1922), suggests this view as well. For a thoughtful discussion on the differences between Klein and Sigmund Freud on the concept of phantasy, see Spillius (2001). 6. John Phillips’s (1998) discussion of Melanie Klein’s conception of knowledge is extremely useful regarding many of the points I am making. He describes Klein’s view of knowledge...
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