Education and Learning: Strangers to Psychoanalysis? A Historical Overview

Although Sigmund Freud was not a pedagogically oriented personality, there were educational undercurrents in psychoanalysis, in the “education for reality,” that Freud, in the spirit of Enlightenment, stressed as one of the major tasks of psychoanalysis. However, as psychoanalysis developed, the teaching and training of psychoanalysis took a long time to get organized, while the pioneers of psychoanalysis participated in the more informal theory and case discussion meetings and commented on each other’s talks. Freud inevitably, and partly grudgingly, held the leading role, and was an authoritarian teacher. He did not like to do supervision (called control analysis) and never wrote any theoretical outline of supervisory work.

It was not until the 1920s that psychoanalytic training started to have more regulated forms and forums, especially in Berlin, and later in Vienna and elsewhere. The efforts of Max Eitingon, Karen Horney, and others led to the establishment of the Berlin Poliklinik in 1920 and the International Training Committee of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1925. These institutions formalized psychoanalytic education and laid the foundation for the tripartite training model, which is the basic model even today. The three components of the Eitingon model include seminars (didactic grounding in theory and conceptualization), training analysis (personal experiential level), and supervised practical work. Psychoanalytic education is thus grounded on three tasks: know your theory, know yourself, and know your practice (through supervision). (On the history of psychoanalytic education and supervision, see C. Edward Watkins, Jr., “The Beginnings of Psychoana-

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lytic Supervision: The Crucial Role of Max Eitingon,” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 73, No. 3, 2013, 254-270.)

At the same time, psychology took its early shifts to the more empirical research of children’s development in psychoanalysis through child analysis and in academic psychology through Jean Piaget’s and others’ research. The paradigms of psychoanalysis, academic developmental, and educational psychology did not have much common ground. Psychoanalysis insisted on having its own theoretical “cornerstones” of the dynamic unconscious, infantile sexuality and psychosexual development, drives, repression, intrapsychic conflicts, transference, and resistance, whereas academic psychology, from behaviorism via neo-behaviorism to burgeoning cognitive research, leaned heavily on the “learning” paradigm.

The concept of learning was altogether quite strange to most psychoanalysts. There were few exceptions, for example, John Dollard and Neal Miller, who tried to develop a strict learning theory that had psychoanalytic ingredients. They added drives (what the subject wants) to the depiction of learning consisting of cues (discriminative stimuli), responses, and rewards, and proposed that rewards do not function without drive. Even in the field of psychoanalytic pedagogy, which also emerged in the 1920s, the articles rarely used learning concepts but referred to the upbringing and education of children and adolescents according to psychoanalytic principles. The adult learning processes were hardly mentioned. Initial advice on parental guidance was given by Wilhelm Stekel in Erziehung der Eltern (Education of the Parents, 1934). Transference and resistance issues involved in teaching situations were not discussed much in psychoanalysis before WWII. Later, in the 1970s, when cognitive psychology began to emerge as an academically leading domain, psychoanalytic writings still omitted the discussion of new cognitive learning (and memory) theories and studies. The readiness of psychoanalysts for interdisciplinary approaches was mostly lacking.

In the field of psychoanalytic pedagogy, the journal Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik (Journal for Psychoanalytic Pedagogy, Heinrich Meng and Ernst Schneider, eds., 1926-1937) was the first publication for developing psychoanalytically oriented educational science and practice. Several people tried to advance educational reforms according to the psychoanalytic lines (see also my article, “To Educate or Not to Educate Through Psychoanalysis–and in Psychohistory,” Clio’s Psyche, Vol. 22, Nos. 1-

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2, 2015, 65-70). Among the first to develop practical psychoanalytically oriented educational work was Siegfried Bernfeld with his coworkers (Gerhard Fuchs and Wilhelm Hoffer, among others). As a reform pedagogue, Bernfeld was the leader of the Jewish Institute for Youth Research and Education.

In 1919, after the First World War, an American relief organization (the American Joint Distribution Committee) founded the Kinderheim Baumgarten (Baumgarten Children’s Home) in Vienna. This was solely for Jewish orphans or half-orphans and included a kindergarten, a school, and a home under Bernfeld’s leadership. The number accommodated at first was 240 boys and girls from three to 16 years of age. The Children’s Home aimed to advance what was formerly philanthropic work to a higher social-pedagogical level while mixing elements from Maria Montessori’s, Otto Rank’s, and Gustav Wyneken’s educational ideas. In furtherance of this aim, scientific child and youth research was encouraged. The Baumgarten Children’s Home provided the opportunity for research on children’s and adolescent’s organizational activities, their play, literary and artistic products, and fantasies. It was also possible to experiment with “modern education” in the setting of this institution and to keep the authoritarian effect on children and youth to a minimum.

Anna Freud called Bernfeld’s Baumgarten the “first attempt to use psychoanalytic principles in education” (“Willie Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D.,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol. 23, 1968, 7). This educational experiment led by Bernfeld ended abruptly in April 1920 because the bourgeois Jewish circles, as financial supporters of the Home, had severe doubts about “socialist” (even “Bolshevist”) education and decided to stop the experiment in the Baumgarten Children’s Home. Later, this utopian example influenced pioneering kibbutzim in Palestine and Israel.

There were also other kindergartens, schools, and social-pedagogical settings where psychoanalytic-pedagogical ideas were applied before WWII. For example, Children’s Home-Laboratory was founded in Moscow in 1921. It was mainly meant for a small group of children of Party functionaries who left the raising of their children (including Stalin’s son) to its staff. It was run by Vera Schmidt, a teacher who had no analytic training but was interested in psychoanalysis. She was influenced by the educational-therapeutic experiments in the kindergartens and children’s/youth homes organized by August Aichhorn (Jugendheim Oberhollabrunn

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[Youth Home Oberhollabrunn]) and Siegfried Bernfeld (Kinderheim Baumgarten) in Vienna.

The idea followed by Vera Schmidt was that the educators would also work on themselves and undergo analysis to remove most of the harmful effects of their own irrational impulses and conflicts and become empathic toward the children. This demand was not fulfilled. It was impossible to arrange proper psychoanalytic training and supervision and to replace the disorganization, lack of long-term research management, storing of unanalyzed data (concerning children’s play, their language, artistic activities, and expressions of sexuality), and continuous turnover of educators. After rumors, surveillance, and commission inspections, the Children’s Home-Laboratory and the State Psychoanalytic Institute were closed in 1925 (Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, 1997, 210-212).

In April 1924, at the Eighth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Salzburg, Bernfeld criticized the way psychoanalysis had been applied to pedagogy. The motives of education, the psychic prerequisites for educational forms, the types of pedagogical ideologies and rationalizations, not to mention the educators, all needed psychoanalytic elucidation in Bernfeld’s view (“Kritik der bisherigen Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Pädagogik” [“Criticism of the application, so far, of psychoanalysis to pedagogy”], Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse [International Journal of Psychoanalysis], Vol. 10, 224). He was also polemically determined to correct the attitudes of educators to certain practical issues. He reminded his audience that psychoanalysis in no way supported the conception of childhood as an especially plastic developmental period. On the contrary, the younger and more bound to heredity and drives the person was, the more shut off he/she was from outer influence. Thus, it was obvious that, for Bernfeld, psychoanalysis had reached the boundaries of educational enterprise: It could help adult educators to understand better their drives and functions, but its educational potential among small children was mainly negative. It provided “pessimistic pedagogy,” which was emerging through the psychoanalysis of collective phenomena.

School pedagogy (not so much curriculum) was one of the main areas of interest in psychoanalytic pedagogy. Intellectual inhibitions (e.g., learning disorders, learning difficulties, and difficulties of understanding), as well as shyness, anxiety, and examination fears were linked to unconscious processes. Working with the posi-

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tive transference in the educational context was the primary tool for treating learning and relational problems. Erik Homburger Erikson, who had made some cultural comparisons of childrearing, including sexual education (e.g., “Psychoanalysis and the Future of Education,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1935, 50-68; “Observations on Sioux Education,” The Journal of Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1939, 101-156), favored children’s sexual curiosity and their sexual research. Education in schools, with the help of psychoanalysis, could support curiosity and create a motivating learning process without imposing instruction by force.

In the early 1920s, “Red Vienna” was favorably inclined to advance both Freudian psychoanalytic and Adlerian individual psychological pedagogy, opening many educational counseling centers. From the mid-1920s, Anna Freud, Wilhelm Hoffer, August Aichhorn, and others arranged courses for pedagogues and insisted on the advantages of the “education of the educators” through psychoanalytic perspectives. Under National Socialism, the pioneers of psychoanalytic pedagogy in Austria and Germany were expelled or, like Bruno Bettelheim and Ernst Federn, imprisoned in concentration camps.

Anna Freud was much more optimistic than Bernfeld while delineating the contributions of psychoanalysis to pedagogy, which is clear in The Writings of Anna Freud: Vol. I, 1922–1935. Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Lectures for Child Analysts and Teachers (1974). She welcomed psychoanalysis as a critique of established educational forms. She saw psychoanalysis as expanding the human knowledge of the educators and clarifying their understanding of the complex relationships between the educators and the children. Finally, child analysis was in the position to alleviate the harm done to a child during childrearing and schooling.

Currently, psychoanalytic training needs to move on from mechanical and hierarchical teaching and learning of the theories and cornerstones to the creative, critical, dialogical, and self- and co-reflective teaching and learning processes. This calls forth not only cognitive learning, but also reflective, transformative, and flexible lifelong learning that embraces both semantic and emotionally tinged autobiographical memories. Psychoanalytic insights can be shared in interdisciplinary endeavors that consider the recent developments in various domains of research. Learning is an open field, and psychoanalysis is also about learning (and memory), although many psychoanalysts have defended themselves against this in-

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sight.

Crucial questions remain: Will psychoanalysts and teachers, both representatives of the “impossible profession,” search what is implied in the emotional situation of education and teaching? Will they be curious about the uncertainties, ambivalences, disparities, impressions, and “difficult knowledge” (compare Deborah P. Britzman, “Between Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy: Scenes of Rapprochement and Alienation,” Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, 95-117)? Is transformative learning and interdisciplinary education still something alien, strange to psychoanalysis? What is the changing reciprocal relation between psychoanalysis and pedagogy today?

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