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

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR “THOUGHTS AWAITING THINKERS”: GROUP PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATIONAL LIFE At the close of World War II, D. W. Winnicott (1994) addressed politicians and administrators, inviting them to consider the unconscious. It was a strange invitation, audacious really, because he knew something about the psychical difficulties of doing just that. Maybe Winnicott meant them to inquire into relations between the psychosis of war and the more ordinary neurosis made in institutional life. Perhaps he wanted to shake their confidence in the pervasive wish that policy makers were rather like curators in a museum when he writes: “The unconscious may be a nuisance for those who like everything tidy and simple, but it cannot be left out of account by planners and thinkers” (113). Another effort to bring thinking and the unconscious a bit closer became more pointed: “In human affairs, thinking is but a snare and a delusion unless the unconscious is taken into account” (1990d, 169). How is it possible to take the unconscious into account when it can only be known through the indirection of its symptoms and then the gamble of interpretation, and when its very qualities are other to the conventions of logic? And what, then, does one take into account when one takes into account the human affair of the unconscious?1 97 98 AFTER-EDUCATION There is something asocial, even antisocial, about the unconscious, and this makes Winnicott’s invitation to think about the unconscious uncanny, because he is addressing what is there but is still missing: forces that fundamentally influence—by its symptom—the emotional qualities exchanged within the scene of group deliberations. Sigmund Freud’s (1916) description of a symptom is that exchange: “The construction of a symptom is a substitute for something else that did not happen” (280). The symptom is a placeholder, made from that volatile combination of wishes and fears that belongs to individuals. These asocial qualities are brought to groups and serve to substitute for thought, even as the symptom also composes group psychology by marking what is missing, what could have happened but did not. Yet it is difficult to grasp our unconscious susceptibility to others, particularly if we are trying to understand something as elusive as a missed experience. The difficulty is twofold: one part belongs to the contradiction between what happens to each of us in the world and how our perception of the emotional qualities of our events may or may not be in tune with either those of others or the event itself. How can we know an experience that has been missed? The other difficulty is trying to communicate to others something of this dissonance that is not yet apparent , ready for thinking or, paradoxically, even actually experienced.2 Both difficulties, as we will see later in this chapter, belong to the psychical design of the transference, communicating, however awkwardly or lovingly, our susceptibility both to the other’s vulnerability and to our own. Group psychology is the nature of that communication. There is, in educational life, something paradoxical about how the unconscious can actually be considered, particularly because—to return to Winnicott’s earlier warning—the needs for tidiness and simplicity, so tied to dreams of mastery, prediction, management, and control, are all idealizations that defend against the loneliness of institutional life. Psychoanalytically speaking, these very needs are the imaginary sites where meaning breaks down, loses its object, and even reverses its intentions. We know that educational life prides itself on its deliberateness and its capacity to proliferate measurable outcomes. At the level of group organization , there also is the institutional hope for people to somehow learn to work with one another. But agreement on the meanings of practices, in the case of the group, seems to lag behind and even ignore how practices are mandated, where they come from and, more significantly, how they are interpreted. Indeed, the tension is that the institutional ethos of systematicity, or the belief that a system of operation can be transparent unto itself, forecloses any thought of the unconscious and, “THOUGHTS AWAITING THINKERS” 99 hence, the work of interpretation itself. Alan Bass (1998) locates the disclaimed tension: “Wherever one finds systematicity, one can, from a psychoanalytic point of view, ask the question of what unbearable piece of reality is being defended against by means of the system” (426). For Bass and for many of...