Without discipleship: a psychoanalytic study of influence for education

AbstractWhile psychoanalytic and educational research consistently document a fraught relation between the two fields, they share in common the problem of how to influence others in the direction of psychical and perhaps more so in the case of education, social change. And yet, the changes at stake in psychoanalytic theory do not proceed from conscious effort or the right kind of knowledge. In this paper, I consider the problem of influence as an ironic registration marked not by the analyst's intention, insight or charisma, but by her capacity to survive the disillusionment of these ideals in the face of the analysand's regressive crises. Drawing on two analytic pairings (Loewald/Lear and Winnicott/Little), I show that the foundation of psychical change proceeds not from instruction or insight but, from the opposite direction: or, the analysand's regression. For education, what remains is a question of how the teacher can survive not only the helplessness of her own helping hand, but also the hatred of this vulnerable human condition.Keywords: psychoanalysisinfluencepedagogyHans LoewaldD.W. Winnicott AcknowledgementsThis article is part of a three-year research project, 'Spaces of Memory', funded by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, to which I am grateful for its support.Notes1. While Loewald does not cite Winnicott in his paper on therapeutic action, he does extensively cite Winnicott's notion of illusion, which he re-names 'enchantment', in his later discussions of symbolisation and art. But where for Winnicott the state of illusion implies the mother's recognition of the distinction between self and baby, Loewald argues that the mother, like her infant, knows no distinction as she participates in this realm. It is in the space of illusion where Loewald puts not only the work of artistic creation, but the 'art' of both mothering and psychoanalysis.2. Winnicott made a list, as he often did, to outline the qualities of an environment required to survive dependency. Of these, Winnicott included the regular pace and timing of appointments, the temperature of the room, which is ideally free of 'unpredictable sounds', and that would include a 'rug' and the availability of water (1954, 285). Winnicott also describes the position of the analyst as at one and the same time 'alive, breathing' and yet still 'objective' (285). In other words, the analyst could be 'himself' or 'herself' without being in conflict with her role as neutral listener.3. In his 'Regression' paper, Winnicott cites a case in which he made a 'correct' interpretation that was practically wrong because it came, 'six years too early' (1954, 280). Winnicott explains that his eagerness to give the interpretation was defensive, for, at the time, he did 'not yet fully believe in regression' (280). When Winnicott more 'fully believed in regression', he theorised the importance the analyst's provision of an environment that could both hold the patient's illusions of omnipotence and hold back on interpretations that would interrupt them too soon. And yet, this 'holding' environment did not at the same time mean doing nothing. Rather, it might be understood in terms of 'negative capability', or an orientation that could tolerate not knowing as part and parcel of making meaning, without reaching too quickly for an answer.4. Kristeva (Citation2010) documents precisely this fantasy in one of her clinical cases in which the patient's tendency toward self-analysis is read as a defence against using the analyst's interpretations.5. If Winnicott noted the need for survival as the grounds of analysis, he was not at the same time advocating for the analyst's passivity. Rather, he was attuned to the emotional extremes of the counter-transference that pierced any ideal of perfect neutrality – hatred and anxiety among them. For Winnicott, it was the analyst's own capacity for life that meant s/he could be used without being destroyed, and through which the patient could reach the terrors of early life, without having to live for the other.6. Another one of Winnicott's famous patients, Masud Khan, provides a site for analysis about anxieties of influence. Khan saw Winnicott in an analysis that lasted 15 years, beginning in 1951. We also know that during this time, Khan was a practising analyst who was found to violate professional codes of the practice, including socialising, aggressing and engaging in sexual relationships with some of his patients (Hopkins Citation2006). The key controversy of their union comes as a question of whether or not Winnicott knew of Khan's boundary violations. A second dilemma concerns the anxiety of influence as tied to Winnicott's relation to Khan. This is a question of whether – or whether not – Winnicott did enough to influence Khan in a more responsible direction. The urgency of this question suggests that the analyst may well require an element of 'ruthlessness', needed to interrupt illusions of omnipotence that arguably underwrote Khan's violations and the reported cavalier attitude he exuded about them (Hopkins 2006). The case of Khan therefore adds a tension to Little's discussion of the value of regression and the analyst's survival, for it begs the Freudian question about whether the analyst is 'supposed to free the individual from his illusions, in favour of the dictatorship of reason and rationality' (Green Citation2005, 30). Did Khan require disillusionment? What was Winnicott's responsibility in this case? How might the case of Khan itself disillusion Winnicott's views on the value of illusion? These questions take on particular force in the extreme case of Khan, but even in more ordinary cases, they raise the big question of whether the analyst can be permitted more aggression, needed to set limits, than Winnicott believed.7. Little's own mother seems to have struggled with a similar demand for compliance. Little gestures toward the inter-generational quality of her troubles when she observes: 'My mother had to be brave, amusing, and clever … Being afraid was "cowardice," "contemptible"' (1990, 50).8. Years later, when Little sought Winnicott's advice about 'a very disturbed patient', he gestured toward the therapeutic value of the broken vase incident: 'when asking for advice about a very disturbed patient who hurt me knowingly and repeatedly, I spoke of having hurt him. He agreed that I had, but added that it had been "useful"' (1990, 43). If Little comes late to the knowledge that she hurt Winnicott, it was because he told her nothing of the emotional toll of her regression, for he knew that Little could not yet tolerate such disillusionment. At the time, he felt the news of his hatred would be too early. Teachers, too, may wonder when and whether they might express feelings of frustration regarding students. It might be too soon to tell a student of one's hatred.9. This view is in line with Winnicott's formulation of health as containing a 'measure of insanity' that worked against compliance, which he viewed as 'unhealthful' in its excessive normativity (Citation1964, 483).10. We have come full circle to Freud's formulation of education as one of the 'impossible professions' and perhaps also Shoshana Felman's re-articulation of Freud's thesis in her own bold claim: 'Every true pedagogue is in effect an anti-pedagogue' (1987, 72).

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