Teaching, Classroom Authority, and the Psychology of Transference

Transference provides the impulse necessary for understanding and translating the language of the [unconscious]; where it is lacking, the patient does not make the effort or does not listen when we submit our translation to him. Essentially, one might say, the cure is effected by love.

--Sigmund Freud (quoted in Kerr, 1993, p. 123)

[B]ehind the love known as transference is the affirmation of the link between the desire of the analyst and the desire of the patient. This is what Freud expressed in a kind of rapid sleight of hand when he said--after all, it is only the desire of the patient--this should reassure one's colleagues. It is the patient's desire, yes, but in its meeting with the analyst's desire.

--Lacan (1981, p. 254)

"I am putting old heads on your young shoulders," Miss Brodie had told them at that time, "and all my pupils are the crème de la crème." . . .

"It has been suggested again that I should apply for a post at one of the progressive schools, where my methods would be more suited to the system than they are at Blaine. . . . Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life."

The Brodie set smiled in understanding of various kinds. . . .

--Spark (1961, pp. 11-12)

As recently reinterpreted by Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Norman Holland, and others, psychoanalysis remains an important influence upon English studies, with much still to teach us regarding the unconscious processes involved in composing and interpreting texts. What, we might also ask, can psychoanalysis teach us about teaching? What if we were to subject the "texts" of our own classroom experience to analysis? We address the relationship of teaching to psychoanalysis. In combining our perspectives--one of us teaches English literature and rhetorical theory and the other directs a writing center and conducts research in feminist rhetorical theory--we seek to analyze and critique the structures of authority in the traditional college literature classroom by comparing them to the alternative structures of the writing center and the feminist pedagogies of peer inquiry. ¹

Psychoanalysis and pedagogy doubtless have their differences. But do we know what those differences are? Can our classroom teaching avoid resembling analysis? Should it even try to avoid this resemblance? First, we outline a model of psychology, particularly a model of transference and countertransference, that can serve both to explain and to complicate our own teaching practices. Next, we identify several distinctions between a traditional model of classroom authority--one maintained by what recent feminist theorists have called "bureaucratic organization"--and an alternative classroom guided by "non-bureaucratic organization." We conclude that, although both classroom structures bear a resemblance to analysis, the latter holds out more prospects for positive, "dialectic progress."

Projecting Authority

The Socratic precept nosce te ipsum, "know thyself," belongs as much to literature as to psychology. Both garner self-knowledge through "texts." Psychotherapy and literature study examine different texts. This is true, but only to an extent. Psychoanalysis offers a talking cure through the texts of the analysand: the narratives, confessions, revelations, reinterpretations, and reconstructions of an individual's life, spoken and interpreted within therapeutic dialogue. Similarly, as Holland has argued, texts within the literature classroom become the scenes of a reader's playing-out of his or her own "identity theme" (1973, p. 142). A reader's or writer's imaginative engagement turns texts into many mirrors of the self. In making this point, we do not wish to reduce the literature class to a sort of self-analysis. Literature (and its pedagogy) is more than psychology; literature demands that we acknowledge its cultural and transpersonal origins, its objective history, and its immersion in ideology. ² Psychology cannot be ignored in the teaching of literature. Just as in a psychoanalytic setting, there is more than one...