The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions PDF
Preview The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions
TThhee VVeerryy TThhoouugghhtt ooff EEdduuccaattiioonn PPssyycchhooaannaallyyssiiss aanndd tthhee IImmppoossssiibbllee PPrrooffeessssiioonnss DDeebboorraahh PP.. BBrriittzzmmaann The Very Thought of Education THE VERY THOUGHT OF EDUCATION PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE IMPOSSIBLE PROFESSIONS Deborah P. Britzman s t a t e u n i v e r s i t y o f n e w y o r k p r e s s Published by State University of New York Press Albany © 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Stree, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Fran Keneston Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Britzman, Deborah P., 1952– The very thought of education : psychoanalysis and the impossible professions / Deborah P. Britzman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-2645-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Learning, Psychology of. 2. Psychoanalysis and education. I. Title. BF318.B787 2009 370.15—dc22 2008042785 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface vii 1 The Very Thought 1 2 Uneven Development 27 3 Reading 45 4 Psychology 61 5 Countertransference 81 6 Transference People 103 7 The Impossible Professions 127 Notes 149 References 153 Index 163 v Preface Everything “started” when I had nothing more to say, when I no longer knew where to end or how to end. At that moment, what I had recounted before came back, but in a way that was entirely other, in a discontinuous way, in different forms (memories, dreams, slips, repetitions), or it never came back. I understood that I had tried, by telling the story of “my life,” not to recount it—it is too much for words—but to master it. I had been at once foolish and unfaithful. —Sarah Kofman, “ ‘My Life’ and Psychoanalysis” Freud’s (1900) book of dreams handed psychoanalysts more than a few clues as to the utter diffi culty of undergoing its strange education. He suggested that even in our sleep there is work to be done and in waking life dream work may well be the transfer point for our bungled actions, slips, jokes, misread- ing, wild thoughts, and memories. Through insisting that the dream is both other to conscious life and a commentary on it, by lifting the curtain of his own dream theater to present what is unfaithful, foolish, and inadmissible in rational life, by reading between these lines and even fi nding that which is not there at all, by remembering the forgotten as signifying remnants of missed meaning, and so, by starting with what is most unintentional, Freud asked those learning psychoanalysis to become students of their ignorance. We are asked to take the side of the wish for this other world by associating with it and greeting this curiosity with warm regard. Kofman’s (2007b) fragment of her analysis struggles with another sense of what psychoanalysis feels like: without reason, bereft words return the speaker’s agony. One hundred years later, many analysts think of Freud’s (1900) chapter six, “The Dream Work,” as the text’s navel, the bodily excess that stands for what can never happen again. Having to be born will signify our unrepresentable vii viii PREFACE beginning, and our relation to the other. It will be felt as what Kofman describes as “too much for words.” Yet if the psychoanalyst may only ask for what is uncertain in words—putting unthinkable things into them and call- ing into speech that which is not speech—the request creates more than words can say. The paradox of dreams, and thus of psychoanalysis, is that words return a foreign self; however eloquent, wild, or harsh these words feel, they turn the speaker over to what is most enigmatic, most unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable in her or his life. From the perspective of what cannot be consciously noticed but contin- ues to impress, the dream work compresses, distorts, displaces, reverses, frag- ments, and envisages the day’s residues with our unfi lled wishes. It plays havoc with beginning language, as if each night we learn words for the fi rst time. Dreams are utterly literal, in the sense that they say what they mean without meaning what they say. They arrange what Freud (1900) noticed as “a thing that is capable of being represented” (340) and, in this way, propose our best sug- gestions. Yet dreams are ambiguous and with this claim Freud will tell us that the method of their interpretation will suffer from the radical indeterminacy of its subject and object, that the wishes dreams somehow create cannot be met with the analyst’s suggestion of how to think of them. Any interpretation will be speculative and uncertain (Kohon 1986b). In the case of dreams and in the case of education, considerations of representability will only mean that something unknown is being presented. And dreams, Freud writes, “are not made with the intention of being understood” (341). This radical condition impresses the form, style, and force of both the method of dreams and their interpretation. In this transference, both analyst and analysand are affected. Freud was telling us that, just as with the dream work, the psychoanalyst, along with the analysand, would be caught between not knowing and the desire to know, and by creating a transfer of love into knowledge this con- fl ict begins their strange education. The nature of this education, however, is not easy to convey because it exists and does not exist at the same time. This unusual tendency places psychoanalysis in the defenseless position of inviting uncertainty and gambling with nonsense without losing its patience. At the very least, and like the dream, psychoanalysis provides a frame to consider our uncertainty by working through the order of anxiety that destroys our capacity to think. The central theme of The Very Thought of Education begins with the idea that, like the dream, education requires association, interpretation, and a narrative capable of bringing to awareness, for further construction, things that are farthest from the mind. And whatever education is dedicated to, all education suffers a radical fate of indeterminacy. The approach that can best
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