Psychoanalytic Pedagogy in the Works of Bracher, Berman, and Alcorn

Importing psychoanalytic theory into the writing classroom is a complex and challenging task in light of post-structuralist ethics. Since the 1980s, cultural criticism has questioned the veracity of psychoanalytic interpretation, arguing that criticism grounded in history and culture can better investigate transformative possibilities, expose hidden ideologies, and free suppressed voices. Mark Bracher, Jeff Berman, and Marshall Alcorn have focused on pedagogy in the college writing classroom. None would identify as psychohistorians, but they link social behavior and states of individual consciousness to analyze the intrapsychic processes that inform learning, a strategy of specific utility in facing resistant learners. Psychohistorians study peoples’ conscious and unconscious motives, using historical research and clinical insights to generate a well-rounded view of historical forces that contribute to social problems. However, as Mark Bracher has pointed out, “identifying forms of power in the past does not necessarily tell us anything about how oppression and injustice are operating in the present, and even if it does tell us something about oppression and injustice in the present, that knowledge by itself does not necessarily change things for the better” (Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism, 1993, 7).

With this existential claim, Bracher does not seek to do away with historical interpretation when considering psychoanalysis and pedagogy. On the contrary, he brings history into a present moment, thereby making social and cultural change possible. As he makes clear, most contemporary cultural criticism has failed in the sense that it has not achieved social impact. Bracher asserted that a true understanding of how individuals change could be generalized to encourage social reform. “It is human subjectivity as such,” Bracher said, “and not the various forces that help to construct that subjectivity or to provoke its behavior, that we must investigate if we are to get to the heart of those behaviors that constitute social problems” (Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change, 2). Social transformation is not simply a matter of teaching political truths; the nature of personal and political gain is gradual.

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Knowledge derives from promoting change rather than being a goal in itself.

As his work evolved, Bracher continued to believe that education should promote the development of multifaceted, prosocial identities, which he views as the task of psychoanalysis. He writes, “The personal and societal importance of helping students develop secure, resilient, and viable identities is enormous” (“A Psychoanalytic Literary Pedagogy: Practices for Identity Development,” Clio’s Psyche, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2021, 91). Realizing the shortcomings of psychoanalytic pedagogy, he turned to social psychology and a literature-based pedagogy wherein students could identify with various literary characters and apply compassionate understanding. Students should understand the importance of social justice as a goal and explore the process of identity formation. As Bracher maintains, the “basic function of education should be to promote the development of more secure, multifaceted, resilient, and prosocial identities,” which is psychoanalytic at the core (91).

Conceptualizing human subjectivity fuels many pedagogical debates, especially in higher education. In my work on composition and creative writing, I focus less on the writing process and more on the writing subject. While the romantic, expressivist model prizes the consistency of the ego, much composition theory has come to assume that knowledge is socially constructed and rhetorical, a set of shifting interpretations based on agreement among members of a community. But such agreement might not even be possible if the dominant culture excludes minority voices and their realities.

Challenging the various formulations of the writing subject is only one obstacle facing those who subscribe to psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis is always inherently risky for those who are not professionally trained as analysts. Many academicians have come to refute Freud for being an individualist, claiming that he substitutes private psychological causes and explanations for historical and social ones. Continuing concerns raised about the historicity of psychoanalysis have placed it in a precarious position in both the sciences and humanities. The question is whether or not that invalidity is justified.

Bracher’s social message about identity formation and its effect on the group sheds even more light on literary theory as he extends theories of literacy to social justice and compassion. In-

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sight is best achieved when the voice of the unconscious is shared with another person, whether it be the analyst or the teacher. Other questions arise: Is the self something that can be written into being, or is it always contingent on the ideological and political forces with which it identifies? Can the emotional and affective under hauntings of our beings surface and be remedied? How can teaching help to assuage the pain that some individuals feel as a result of social indifference?

Readers of Berman’s works will quickly discern how a writing pedagogy can lead to students’ personal transformation. His use of psychoanalysis as a tool in composition has been praised by traditional and innovative critics alike and has resulted in a series of pedagogical books. His willingness to examine his own life openly is a model for his students, such as in Diaries to an English Professor: Pain and Growth in the Classroom (1994). This work reveals a teacher devoted to empathetic teaching, which is the title of his later book, Empathetic Teaching: Education for Life (2004). That book asks English professors to conduct a form of inquiry that reads between the lines of student writing as a way of revealing heretofore unilluminated parts of the psyche. Putting that in context, one can see how psychoanalytic pedagogy has changed the traditional classroom from issues of rhetoric to engaging the person of the student.

Berman’s approach in the college classroom often brings up painful experiences and therefore can’t avoid transference and countertransference. Berman states, “the teacher’s role in the process is not passive but active; teachers observe reactions to students’ writings and guard against the projection or incorporation of inappropriate feelings” (Empathetic Teaching: Education for Life, 16). Like analysts, teachers must be aware of their own mechanisms for making countertransferences.

Berman also encourages students to empathize with one another as a means of understanding themselves. Empathy can be good in itself, but it can also be exploitative if what one perceives as weakness in the other is used to take advantage or gain control. Berman discusses how teachers, regarded as trusting, supportive, and dependable, become attachment figures, influencing students to become more aware of themselves and their classmates. In allowing students to open up and confront difficult knowledge, he advises all teachers to be aware of resources on campus, should students need psychological support or guidance.

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As Berman notes about self-disclosing writing, “this was the key safeguard: empathy, the ability to understand another person’s feelings and thoughts without judgment or criticism” (Risky Writing: Self-Disclosure and Self-Transformation in the Classroom, 2002, 67). Empathy is not to be taken lightly as protection against endangering students who expose painful traumas. As creative writers have long known, all approaches to writing can make use of unconscious material and “working through” these as a path to both comprehending oneself and the needs of others. The challenge for teachers is how to best contain a safe place for student disclosures.

Marshall Alcorn’s Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Constructions of Desire (2002) poses an interesting challenge to teachers who promote social change through pedagogy. He argues that facilitating social change through teaching requires changing the subjectivity of students. Intrapsychic processes such as resistance or “the desire not to know” are fundamentally emotional and ungoverned by typical logic. Therefore, students cannot simply find another subject position because it “fits” better with the demands of authority. For students to change, they must experience a shift in knowledge. From this perspective, change requires some labor of mourning that works upon the dying body of ideology or ideological assumptions that are resistant to learning. To encourage discourse and free speech in the classroom, Alcorn does not specify one ideology over another. He is only saying that the dialectic between acceptance and denial is ongoing and that change requires time for the students to mourn the loss of the old principles, which can impede the acquisition of new knowledge, and teachers should account for that when trying to introduce material that might prove controversial.

For Alcorn, significant change requires mourning and may meet resistance on the part of the ego that maintains its perimeters defensively by warding off competing ideas that threaten to alter or destroy it. Mourning does not just involve the knowledge of loss without possible replacement; it also requires coming to terms with painful emotions. He links Freud’s grief work with the learning process and shows that what can be defended can also be mourned. In a more recent book, Resistance to Learning: Overcoming the Desire Not to Know in Classroom Teaching (2013), Alcorn studies how students naturally resist information that challenges their world views. Serving such students successfully requires educating educators about resistance, defenses, emotion, and alliances. They

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can then assist students in optimally fostering the kind of compassion that Bracher encourages in his pedagogical call for literacy.

While many students can grasp emotions, understanding them happens on a level that makes writing about emotions difficult. Yet if we do not talk about feelings, we risk serious misunderstandings. Affects go beyond emotional response to display how one is feeling and how those feelings should be interpreted.

Classroom teachers informed by Bracher’s, Berman’s, or Alcorn’s theoretical arguments will understand that teaching is not a simple aspect of human potentiality. It is complexly indicative of transferences, projection, and displacement. Teaching is also a schoolhouse for emotions that helps students mine the hollows of their unconscious biases to understand this human venture of learning “to learn,” which is not simply a redundancy but makes real sense. Although not self-consciously psychohistorical, pedagogical approaches like Bracher’s, Berman’s, and Alcorn’s that make use of intellectual history through the lens of the individual psyche can provide a framework for education that transcends the classroom to teach students about life itself.

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