Education for Life: Berman’s Use of Death to Teach about

Review of Jeffrey Berman, Death in the Classroom: Writing about Love and Loss. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. 283 pages, ISBN: 0791476316 (hardcover) at $74.95, ISBN: 0791476324 (paperback) at $24.95.

Jeffrey Berman is no stranger to taking risks in the composition classroom. His use of psychoanalysis as a tool in composition has resulted in a series of pedagogical works that examine the impact of writing and reading about traumatic subjects. Praised by traditional and innovative critics alike, Berman’s method continues to be groundbreaking, allowing the students to speak for themselves, through journal and diary entries. This is his riskiest book, demonstrating how their writing about death and bereavement affected classmates and teacher alike, leading to educational and psychological breakthroughs.

Death in the Classroom is structured similarly to his earlier books, Diaries to an English Professor, Surviving Literary Suicide, Risky Writing, and Empathetic Teaching. The subject of each book is based on a course Professor Berman has taught and, after much reflection and research, which he

Page 203

synthesizes into a compelling study of the writing classroom. He assigns reading material (typically literary works) that become catalysts for self-disclosures interspersed throughout the pages of the text. He also includes detailed syllabi, bibliographies, appendices, and letters from past students looking back on how the course influenced or transformed their lives, giving them psychological insights into their lives.

Throughout, Berman demonstrates the vitality of a teacher and critic immersed in the process of teaching, and understanding what and whom he is teaching. His willingness to openly examine his own life is infectious among the students—as each in his or her own way follows a line of inquiry that he or she may not have done before—becoming a more thoughtful and fully realized human being. Yet, Berman takes many risks in encouraging students to delve into their most private thoughts, remembrances, and fantasies—in order to mine material that is painful, drawing, understandably, negative attention as well as positive. Teaching writing is probably, aside from individual psychoanalytic treatment, the most favorable setting for pursuing psychoanalytic practice and research. Yet, one might still wonder if a psychoanalytic “writing cure” is appropriate for all students. Furthermore, should a teacher, or a “lay psychoanalyst” be using psychoanalytic techniques in the classroom that deliberately probe controversial topics such as sexual abuse, addiction, suicide, eating disorders, AIDS, or betrayals of trust?

Professor Berman is the first to acknowledge that he is not a trained therapist and he is not interested in psychoanalyzing his students. His belief is that when students are engaged into topics that are truly personal to them, they write better essays. As an individual and as a society, we can use the psychoanalytic process to avoid unwittingly repeating past patterns that are detrimental to our self-development and transformation.

Page 204

It is important to see Berman as a researcher who draws from a vast fund of psychological literature and scientific studies of the benefits of cathartic writing. He is no novice, having served as a research scholar at the Training Institute of the National Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), giving him a background for writing his early literary analysis. In The Talking Cure (a study of representations of psychoanalysis in literature), Berman showed an appreciation for how the reader fills in the gaps in the text with his or her own understandings through the filter of his or her own biases and unconscious identifications.

Professor Berman innovatively turned the focus of his teaching of writing through literary analysis from interpreting literature to relying on the students themselves to a greater extent. Their thoughts, feelings, and fantasies about the subject matter of the text became more of the focus as they thereby disclosed as much about themselves as about the meaning of the text. From here, it is easy to see how Berman moved to the next step by encouraging students to reflect on the trauma represented in the literature through empathizing and examining their own life experiences. In my view, the procedure is akin to the psychoanalytic process in which the analyst’s job is to reflect back to the patient what is learned from his or her transference and defenses—making the “text” all about the patient (or reader). Consistently, Berman sheds light on a process that is powerfully insightful and meaningful to students in ways that writing academic essays will never be.

This professor is not alone in his conviction that personal testimony, or first-hand experience, can be extended into larger social ramifications in research projects. Aware of how volatile topics such as anorexia or AIDS may be, Berman takes measures in order to protect student privacy. He assures his students that diaries are confidential and do not contribute to the final grade; he protects anonymity. Stu-

Page 205

dents can always opt out of having a diary read by their professor or classmates. He does not address the content of the diary, only the mechanics or grammar errors that obscure or hinder a writer’s communication with his reader. His books, such as Surviving Literary Suicide (1999), Risky Writing (2002), and Empathic Teaching (2004), encourage college students to write safely on a wide range of subjects often deemed too personal or too dangerous for the classroom, from grieving the loss of a friend to confronting sexual abuse. His focus is on the safeguard flowing from the non-critical empathetic approach to the experiences, feelings, and thoughts of others in the classroom. Through a discussion of several well-known stories, such as Goodbye Mr. Chips, Berman discusses how teachers who are regarded as trusting, supportive, and dependable become attachment figures, influencing students to be more sensitive to and connected with their classmates’ lives. As Berman succinctly puts it, empathic teaching leads to empathic learning: an education for life.

In 2002, Berman’s wife of 30 years received the devastating news that she had terminal cancer. Anguished and in shock, Berman tried to cope with his pain, finding some relief in teaching, immersing himself in the lives of his students. At times, he drew on his own resources as a catalyst for students writing about grief, or the loss of loved ones through death or abandonment. Two years after his wife’s death, he published a stunning memoir Dying to Teach, which takes an unflinching look at dying, and spousal bereavement. Writing, Berman reasons, is the only way we can memorialize those who have gone from us, by giving presence to what has become irremediably lost. Death in the Classroom comes out of this experience. No one is spared the inevitability of death, and hardest of all is accepting the actuality of one’s own death. We may return to it cyclically, or through a process of forgetting and remembering. Berman

Page 206

writes that we cannot so much teach death as much as “that we can teach our own perceptions of death, our own experiences with the dying, and we can learn from others’ experiences. Students who shared their essays on death also learned from classmates’ experiences.” Consequently, “students discovered that their anger, sadness, confusion, and guilt are part of the process of grieving.”

The book is divided into sections in which students are encouraged to explore their own feelings about death through very unusual means, such as asking students to invent obituaries of each other or to write an eulogy for a loved one. While these assignments may strike some readers as being too depressing or prompting of students’ painful emotions, many of the students reported feeling better after writing. Writing the eulogy made them feel closer to the lost loved one, or helped them make necessary reparations, or eased their grief by allowing language to absorb and distract them from uncontrollable grief. The classroom discussions following Berman’s reading the eulogies aloud proved useful in helping students to empathize with others and realizing that they are not alone in their conflicted feelings about death. As Berman quotes one student, “It’s an important thing in the grieving process, and helps you gain a perspective. It’s therapeutic.”

In Chapter Four, students read “The Book of Job” in order to raise conflicts one feels about death—how unfair it is—and how to justify a God who can bestow life only to take it away. Such a discussion naturally turns to issues of faith and religious belief and Berman reports that one student became angry with him and accused him of being a “false prophet.” Here I think Berman is on his riskiest ground because he has already disclosed to the students that he is an agnostic, setting up a potential problem regarding a student’s wish to emulate her teacher. A chasm as deeply separating as religious conviction and agnosticism may pose a threat to

Page 207

the student’s sense of self. A more affecting chapter involves students reading Wuthering Heights and imagine being Cathy Heathcliff, whose mother died in childbirth, writing a letter to her deceased mother about this deep deprivation in their lives—enabling students to again cycle through feelings about the value of life and its richness when seen through the glass darkly—of the loss of life. How would life differ if one had no mother?

Chapter Seven returns to the classroom dynamics. Here, the self-disclosures of the teacher about his own grief over his wife’s death help students to be more empathetic towards their classmates. Although death is the anxious object, something to be feared, talking and writing about it as a group provides the kind of solidarity among students that grief groups offer participants—but this is through reading other writers’ works, including a novel that deals with the topic of euthanasia, a particularly heated and controversial topic.

In “Ten Things to Do Before I Die” students became more aware of what constitutes living than what constitutes dying. The final chapter devoted to “A Teacher’s Self-Elegy” is perhaps the most moving entry in the long series of Berman’s books in which he articulates a life project. He writes of himself as identified with a pedagogical relationship “based on reciprocal trust and, within professional boundaries, love.” He does “not regard himself as a master” and is “keenly aware of the deficiency of his education.” He does not “regard his students as disciples” since he believes he learns “as much from his students as he hoped they learn[ed] from him.”

As with all of Berman’s books, Death in the Classroom deals with an extremely important topic. Through the publishing of student essays as literature rather than as case studies—our attitudes toward taboos can be understood if not

Page 208

transformed, helping students, through reading, writing, and classroom discussion, to reflect on their lives. Jeffrey Berman states his professorial credo quite clearly: “Writing is one of the very best ways to confront a problem, because writing something often allows us to see a solution to a problem we hadn’t seen before. Writing will identify a problem and then find ways of responding to that problem.” Yet his books are about so much more. They restore our belief in the human contract, that is, we understand what is meant by the golden rule. There is no discourse alone that can teach us how to love or how to die, but there is the discourse that teaches us how to learn.

Page 209