Relational Pathways to a Critical Pedagogy

On Feeding and Being Fed

The phenomenology of the student-teacher relationship is a fascinating topic. I have long known, when I was a student, that my relational experience with an instructor and the classroom environment could either inspire feelings of confidence, competence, and engagement, or intimidation, trepidation, and withdrawal. When the situation is optimal, there is a sense of being held, nurtured, and contained. The information provided is not only digestible but also meant to be thought on and played with. Critical faculties are heightened. The linking of thoughts and experiences occurs. One is not only banking information but developing a deeper appreciation for how knowledge develops, its purpose, and how it informs one’s thoughts and experience globally—a kind of critical consciousness, as described by Paulo Freire in Education for Critical Consciousness (1972). Although likely a rare experience for most given our current educational norms, those relations are the most inspiring, especially as we identify with and enact those

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internalized experiences within our teaching careers.

Although the above bipolar view of the student-teacher relationship would be better understood as a momentary continuum, the dichotomy helps to unpack relational experiences vital to learning enhancement. On a very basic level, in the more ideal instance, there is a sense of being held and nurtured, facilitating the most fundamental aspects of learning and critical thought. Opposingly, the student is there to psychologically nurture the instructor, which contains a sense of inadequacy—thwarting learning and critical faculties and, arguably, reinforcing historical social dominant trends. This supports social dominance referring to the caste-like expectations of hierarchies and the role education has played in the socialization of the biases most typically found along socio-economic, gendered, or racial/ethnic lines.

The power of the student-instructor relationship to unconsciously influence one’s feelings of competence and possibly facilitate the enactment of larger cultural expectations necessitates the analysis of unspoken transferential relational aspects. University of California, Los Angeles professor of history and psychohistory Peter Loewenberg explored the latent functions of such a dynamic in graduate education within his text Decoding the Past (1966), writing that the “graduate process is one of transference regression to earlier situations and fantasies of childhood, particularly in respect to authority” (48-49). Loewenberg, using largely oedipal psychology, focuses on the regression of the student, often to feed the narcissistic needs of the instructor as a typical dynamic of the learning experience, creating a level of dependence. This dependence is positive or negative depending on the process and outcome. Positive dependence is like a kind of Kohutian idealism in which the student identifies with and, through the identification, experiences a kind of epistemic trust permitting the information to be incorporated, fundamentally altering world views. Loewenberg describes this process as going awry when the student is infantilized by the instructor to contain the projections of inferiority, reinforcing authoritarian and social dominant tendencies (49).

In this short piece for the special issue on the psychoanalysis of education, I will add two aspects to Loewenberg’s thoughts on the impact of transferential relations between student and instructor. The first is Wilfred Bion’s preoedipal psychology, which helps further unpack the earliest relational experience of learning that may be enacted in the classroom. The second explores trans-

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ference beyond an enactment of childhood conflicts as a means by which ethnic/racial, gendered, and socio-economic biases inherent to the historical caste-based hierarchy in the U.S. are maintained within the educational system.

Wilfred Bion provides a good starting point for understanding preoedipal relational aspects of learning in Learning from Experience (1962) that parallels Loewenberg’s as well as Paolo Freire and other critical pedagogical proponents. Bion also emphasizes experiences that facilitate either learning and emotional development or those that lead to psychological breakdown and malignant transformation starting in the earliest of interactions between parent and child. With projection identification as the primary mode of communication between the caregiver and infant, Bion explores the α-function of caregiving in which the “containment” of the infant’s unprocessed, primitive experiences born of frustrated preconceptions allow for the child to incorporate and make meaning from experience (37). This provides an opportunity to identify with the containing object capable of processing these feelings and makes the discovery of meaning possible. Through the continued accumulation of the experience of the caregiver’s capacity to receive and transform distress into comfort, i.e., reverie, or “internal projection identification welcoming objects” form (Jeffrey L. Eaton, “The Obstructive Object,” Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 92, No. 3, 2005, 355-372). In later life, one’s ability to learn from experience and think critically and accurately, extrapolating relevant learning to new experiences, relies on the individual’s capacity to turn toward these “welcoming objects” to provide the linking necessary to transform previously unmetabolized information.

The α-function of parenting is not always possible, being compromised by the parent’s limited reflective functioning, environmental stressors impacting the quality of attachment, and/or
inherent temperamental difficulties in the child, making soothing/containment difficult. The reaction of a child with repeated negative experience is the development of an “obstructive object” and self-attack on the thinking apparatus as a form of “attacks on linking,” i.e., the process by which a part of the self attacks “anything which is felt to have the function of linking one object with another” (Wilfred Bion, “Attacks on Linking,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 40, 1959, 308). Objects could represent interpersonal relations or, intrapsychically, the linking of one thought with another, which is the very kind of thinking required

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for critical analysis.

Gianna Williams discussed a dynamic in which a child finds the parent unavailable to contain their projections and is instead asked to contain the unmetabolized projections of the parent. The “omega function derives from the introjection of an object that is not only impervious, but is both impervious and overflowing with projections” (Williams, “On Different Introjective Processes and the Hypothesis of an ‘Omega Function,’” Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Vol. 19, 1999, 247). No-entry defenses develop along with resistance to taking in any kind of object (sustenance, information, intimacy, etc.) along with a general persecutory worldview. This example in the classroom presents as an infantilization of the student meant to contain the instructor’s insecurities and reify their position of dominance, authority, and student submission to this hierarchy.

Transference is a constant process where present relational circumstances trigger past patterns of relating. The educational experience, as Loewenberg proposed, triggers transferential experiences for the student as they ambivalently enter a position of dependency. In the most ideal of circumstances, there is the transformation of the unmetabolized to the metabolized, allowing the student to digest the information presented and creatively play with and explore meanings heightening critical capacities. In the most pathological instance, parts of the self associated with feelings of impingement and insecurity are triggered, which results in the defensive moves to block input and the thinking apparatus in general. Epistemic mistrust prevails with the banking model of education being the only pedagogy possible.

Beyond a brief comment on environmental stressors interfering with attachment, the conversation has thus far focused on two-person psychology applied to a small group learning environment devoid of the larger contextual factors impacting education. The classroom is embedded within and interacts with numerous
educational, political, legal, market, religious, and community systems with varying viewpoints and effects on the educational process. To discuss this in greater depth is beyond the scope of this short piece, although it deserves mention.

There are social aspects related to the transference phenomenon to address, particularly as the classroom comes to enact social dominant tendencies. New York University Professor of Psycholo-

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gy Susan M. Andersen and S. Adil Saribay’s experimental research goes beyond typical models to demonstrate ethnicity-based transference phenomena as they occur in everyday interactions (“Relational to Collective: Significant-Other Representations, Ethnic Categories, and Intergroup Perceptions,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 33, 2007, 1714-1726). From a psychodynamic standpoint, we find these kinds of unconscious assumptions regarding the other primarily along racial/ethnic, gender, and socio-economic lines, although not exclusive to other group-level identifications, such as immigrant status, and that they are at the heart of overt and covert, macro and microaggressions toward dissimilar others. Dissimilar in the sense that they are not identified with a dominant ideal being already deemed of lower status, reinforcing social positioning and functionally results in phenomena such as racial or gender achievement gaps or the school-to-prison pipeline for African American males.

In the classroom, we may find this in the form of stereotype threat and what Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto label behavioral asymmetry in Social Dominance (1999). Stereotype threat references the anxiety that is aroused when one comes to the barrier of their group’s negative biases and expectations regarding things like academic performance, instigating an unwitting identification with those very biases. Systemically, we may look at this process as a kind of group-level attributive projective identification in the
service of maintaining the current caste-like social hierarchy. But, as Sidanius and Pratto point out, “group oppression is a cooperative game” (Social Dominance, 43), whereby the subordinate group exhibits a tendency of self-debilitation consistent with the negative stereotypes of the dominant group. The transferential relationship between student and teacher becomes the localized unit where the socialization of status may be observed, yet also provides a point of a relational intervention making possible a critical pedological approach, which seeks to upend the use of the educational system for discriminatory or oppressive ends.

Teachers are required to be mindful and sensitive to the kinds of personal and social enactments occurring in the classroom. Providing for the α-function makes possible the examination and meaning-making of underlying transference phenomena making up implicit bias, microaggressions, behavioral asymmetry, and stereotype threats that create and reinforce discriminatory outcomes. As a teacher for the last 15 years or so, I hope I have successfully

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channeled some of those brilliant and nurturing leaders that led me to challenge the alienating and indoctrinating traditional learning experiences and maybe inspired a few myself along the way.

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