A Psychoanalytic Literary Pedagogy: Practices for Identity Development

I maintain that a basic function of education should be to promote the development of more secure, multifaceted, resilient, and prosocial identities—which I also take to be the fundamental task of psychoanalysis. The personal and societal importance of helping students develop secure, resilient, and viable identities is enormous. The task of developing such an identity is particularly pressing for undergraduates, most of whom are still developing their identities. Lacking a stable sense of oneself, students are more likely to experience learning difficulties, struggle with anxiety or depression, suffer from stress-related physical health problems, and/or resort to harmful behaviors.

Poorly developed insecure, rigid, narrow, or unstable identities are also at the root of many of our most severe social problems, including substance abuse, prejudice, ethnocentrism, crime, and violence (Mark Bracher, Social Symptoms of Identity Needs, 2009). Empirical studies—for example, those of Terror Management Theory and Self-Determination Theory—have found that when people’s identities are threatened, their perceptions of others become more truncated and distorted, their feelings toward outgroup members turn more negative, and their behavior is more aggressive. Lacking a secure identity composed of benign contents leads to aggressive and anti-social actions such as those of hyper-individualism, hypermasculinity, and nationalism. Identities that fail to include relationships with others as integral elements of one’s sense of self are also more vulnerable and less prosocial.

Psychoanalysis and education can facilitate identity development through the same basic strategy of helping people to encounter, understand, own, and assume responsibility for elements of themselves—including aspects of the two basic Freudian drives of love and aggression—that had previously not been part of their self

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-concept or operational identity. More specifically, literary study can promote the development of more secure, resilient, and viable identities through the same basic self-examination processes that psychoanalysis engages people in, asking students to note, describe, and examine the implications of their feelings of attraction, resistance, and aggression regarding literary texts and characters.

Early in my teaching career, I incorporated a weekly journal writing assignment into my graduate literature courses. Students were encouraged to describe and reflect on their thoughts and feelings concerning both their professional goals as well as practices and, to the extent that they wished to do so, their personal ideals, values, goals, desires, and conflicts, which their scholarly and professional lives were inevitably connected to. The purpose of this pedagogical practice was in line with the basic aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis: to capture one’s unconscious and conscious desire in language, implicitly if not explicitly, where it could then be examined, owned, and incorporated into one’s sense of self. Following these initial efforts, I subsequently published The Writing Cure (1999) and Radical Pedagogy (2006), which developed this approach into a more comprehensive psychoanalytic pedagogy.

This approach, however, was not valuable for all students. Some proved to be averse to self-examination, and the single-semester, once-a-week meeting was less than ideal for engaging in such a process. So now, instead of having students focus directly on personal issues by writing about their own history and current problems, I focus first on helping them develop a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of human nature through exploring literary characters. Then I encourage them to look at themselves through that general lens of human nature to examine the particular ways in which they personally embody and exhibit basic human qualities, including various forms and aspects of love and aggression, and then reflect on the respective consequences of such an identity.

The self-examination promoted by this literary pedagogy differs significantly from that of classical psychoanalysis, and this difference has both advantages and disadvantages. While this approach lacks the intensity and rigor of psychoanalysis, it does have a major advantage: By first focusing on fictional characters and only then inviting self-examination, it avoids much of the identity threat and defensiveness that often results from more directly confronting one’s impulses, desires, and behaviors. This often enables

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students to dive deeper into troubled waters than a direct approach might.

With this approach, students can maintain a greater level of identity security, which is crucial for all learning, as I documented in Radical Pedagogy. The educational setting must function as a holding environment, providing students with identity security through various forms of recognition, if students are able to risk examination and perhaps alteration of their own identities. Literary study can work in various ways to maintain and even enhance students’ identity security, while at the same time facilitating processes of self-examination that can be quite threatening. One basic way to support identity security is by providing recognition for various identities. Recognition involves some form of acknowledgment from the world that one matters. As numerous teachers and scholars of literature have observed, readers can receive recognition from literature in several ways, most notably by encountering positively represented characters who share an idiosyncratic or marginalized identity content that the reader possesses, including marginalized gender, sexual, physical, or racial identities.

Students’ identity security can also be enhanced by literary representations of characters embodying thoughts, feelings, desires, actions, or demographic categories that the students themselves may be harboring secretly or even unconsciously. In such cases, literary representation can increase students’ identity security by providing a kind of public recognition of, and reducing the shame they may feel for, thoughts, feelings, desires, or actions of theirs that they believe to be abnormal or socially stigmatized.

Supported by such literary recognition, students can then begin to incorporate into their identity certain impulses of empathy, compassion, or generativity. These may have been suppressed or repressed because the impulses conflicted with other powerful identities (e.g., dominating masculinity) or were culturally devalued and therefore not invested in by the students. Literary portrayals of personally and socially beneficial qualities provide opportunities for students to recognize these attributes in themselves and invest in them as contents of their identity.

Developing such prosocial identities provides at least three benefits. First, it motivates prosocial behaviors, which benefit both the actor and the recipients of the prosocial actions. Second, opportunities to enact prosocial identities are readily available, and such

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contents are thus a ready and reliable source of identity security, in contrast to many other contents. While there are limited opportunities for being rich, famous, or powerful, one can always find an occasion to be kind, compassionate, or helpful. Third, providing a new source of identity support and security can enable students to divest from ethnocentrism, toxic gender ideals, aggressive qualities, and so on. They may have been clinging to these as a form of psychic life support.

Literary study can also facilitate students’ engagement with such prosocial identity through their simulation by reading. Recent neurological studies have found that reading literature engages our brains in involuntary, subliminal simulations of the actions, emotions, and attitudes we are reading about. This effectively involves us in trying on alternative identities or scripts. Teachers can support the development of new, more benign, and feasible identities out of these prosocial impulses by directing students’ attention to their actual or simulated enactments of these impulses, helping them recognize both the beneficial consequences of these qualities and their inherence in human nature.

Another way that literary study can foster the development of such prosocial identities is by representing them as implicit in other identities that readers are heavily invested in. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), for instance, emphasizes compassion—which entails the abolition of slavery—as the core of Christian identity. More generally, this novel takes success, strength, dominance, and victory, which are usually defined in terms of physical or material competition, and redefines them as psychological states, which are in principle attainable by virtually anyone. Such redefinitions extricate one from the zero-sum game entailed by many identities in which every winner requires one or more losers.

Literary study can also further the development of benign identities by helping students recognize the positive as well as negative consequences of less benign identities. Many of the various costs and benefits entailed by identities are invisible in real life—hidden in the future, the suffering of other people, or simply dissociated from the contents. Literary study can bring such consequences to light and connect them to the contents that cause them by showing us the inner lives of characters and revealing how various identities play out over time. Teachers can enhance students’ access to such development by engaging them in exploring the costs of and alternatives to their current personally or socially

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harmful actions, which are motivated by their identities.

Finally, literary study can enhance the very structure of identity. One way is by fostering the development of “all-inclusive” identities, the awareness of oneself as constituted by one’s connectedness with others. Literary study can work in several ways to help students recognize and embrace their own multifarious forms of connectedness and interdependencies with others. One way is simply by helping students recognize that their feelings of empathy, sympathy, or identification with literary characters indicate that what happens to other people also happens to themselves in some way.

Another beneficial development in identity structure that can be fostered by literary study is the development of a supra-ordinate self-schema integrating one’s many and sometimes diverging roles, qualities, attributes, thoughts, and feelings into a coherent whole. Literary passages can help students recognize their own inner tensions and contradictions, as well as the existence of problematic or socially unacceptable qualities of themselves, and then work to establish a hierarchy of importance and enactment priorities among these diverse elements. Teachers can facilitate the development of such supraordinate self-schemas by giving students opportunities to reflect on and write about their own experiences of contradictory feelings portrayed in literary texts.

Literary study can also enhance students’ identity coherence by providing them with various narrative prototypes for constructing a more robust narrative identity, a coherent story of their life that integrates the multifarious events and sometimes contradictory actions of their past into a more or less unified sense of self across time. Identity researchers believe that various cultural narratives—for example, stories of national or ethnic origins—are sometimes adopted by individuals as templates to model the trajectory of their own lives. This serves as either a representation of their actual lives up to the present or as a roadmap for arriving at a future self that they expect to reach. Such narrative identities motivate people to conduct their lives in ways calculated to enact the story. They serve as standards against which people judge their worthiness. These narratives are often structured around achieving certain benchmarks—such as completing one’s education, getting married, having children, achieving professional success, or retiring—by a certain age.

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Literary texts can provide students with a repertoire of alternative narrative identities involving trajectories from innocence to experience (e.g., Candide, 1759) or wandering, searching, and aimlessness to epiphany, meaning, and purpose, in which one achieves fulfillment by serving the greater good (e.g., The Jungle, 1906;The Grapes of Wrath, 1939). No matter what elements of success and failure are present in one’s life, some literary texts, such as Keats’s “To Autumn,” offer a narrative identity that anyone can adopt in the form of the universal “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” trajectory. By helping students recognize these portrayals as universal narrative identities incorporating both eros and thanatos, teachers can make available to them an identity structure that can provide profound benefits to them for the rest of the life they share with this planet.

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