After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE DIFFICULT EDUCATION Something about education makes us nervous. In fact, Sigmund Freud accords to education and civilization the development of various neuroses and unhappiness. Yet to imagine this view, the narratives of education must be conceived broadly as the means of both expressing and encountering reality and phantasy. All at once, the time and reach of education can move backward and forward when we recall our history of learning through our childhood, through friendship and love, through the force of ideas, through encounters with cinema, books, and ordinary accidents, and through our hopes for influencing others and being influenced. This particular education is a play between the present and past, between presence and absence, and then, by that strange return that Sigmund Freud (1914a) describes as deferred: it is registered and revised by remembering , repeating, and working through. If we make education from anything, we can make education from experiences that were never meant to be education, and this unnerves our educational enterprise. When Sigmund Freud (1930) argued that education carries psychical consequences, not many people were convinced. After all, a great deal of the official history of education depends upon confining its sphere to concrete manifestations: the school, the textbook, and the objectives. It would take the child analysts—particularly Anna Freud and Melanie Klein— to draw us deeper into the psychical drama both of having to be educated and trying to educate others. But even for these women, whom I will 1 2 AFTER-EDUCATION introduce shortly, a certain incredulity—a resistance—persists toward their work and their world. Freud, however, brought the enterprise of education and the vicissitudes of its phantoms to everyday problems of reality testing and saw in this relation a constitutive failing. In Civilization and Its Discontents , he warned educators that idealizing the world for children and promising them happiness in a life without conflict would only incur helplessness and future disappointment. This book was written between the World Wars, and Freud felt that education would be more relevant, more useful to those subjected to it and to the world, if educators could prepare students for the harshness and difficulties of life and for the inevitable problems of aggression and violence. This plea to educators was the least of his worries, for Freud’s critique of education draws him into a deeper psychoanalytic paradox. If aggression is unavoidable, if it is not just a problem between people but, more pertinently, an operative within each person, how can anyone prepare for what is already there? And, can education even know its own aggression? These questions returned Freud to the profession of psychoanalysis. Can psychoanalysis, itself a helping profession , avoid the dangers of trying to educate? What is the difference between psychoanalysis and education? Does psychoanalytic education, for example, avoid Freud’s critique? How does one think about education without calling forth or stumbling upon the force of history made from one’s own education? In Freud’s writing, for instance, in his discussions on group psychology and psychoanalytic technique, and even in his reminiscence over his own susceptibility to teachers, education persists as being necessary to the very construction of psychoanalytic theory. It may be that both fields have the same trouble: that which makes the heart beat and break belongs to the question of learning and not learning at all. However, responses to not learning in formal education and not learning in the analytic setting differ dramatically. It seems as though in analysis one can wait patiently for education to become meaningful. In an early paper on psychoanalytic technique, Freud (1914a) suggests this lingering time, barely touching on the question of education: “The doctor has nothing else to do than to wait and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided nor always hastened. If he holds fast to this conviction he will often be spared the illusion of having failed when in fact he is conducting the treatment on the right lines” (155). Still, the uncertain question of education returns, now as a sustaining illusion. If education makes us nervous, if its effects are felt before they can be known, and if, at times, it is difficult to distinguish failure from learning, education also DIFFICULT EDUCATION 3 offers Freud a way to configure the influence of central psychoanalytic relations: the playground of transference, the resistance, and the...