Psychohistory, Teaching, and Analytic Neutrality (article)

At the heart of modern science is the notion that one must pursue truth wherever it leads, and this entails a conscious effort to eliminate all personal self-interests and cultural bias. Of course, many people have argued that this goal for objectivity is impossible and hides vested interests. But what is important to stress is that the goals of objectivity, neutrality, and empiricism are impossible but necessary ideals. Moreover, neutrality represents an artificial practice that has to be learned and constantly monitored.

My argument, therefore, is that a fundamental aspect of all higher education is the underlying belief that one should follow truth wherever it leads. To pursue this ideal, one has to be self-critical about one’s prejudices and self-interests. From this perspective, neutrality in research and teaching both rely on the

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combination of critical introspection and the pursuit of empirical evidence. Therefore, what we need to pursue in both our teaching and research are facts, and we have to resist injecting opinions into our academic discourse. Of course, this type of neutrality is hard to maintain and might be an impossible ideal, but we still need to strive to promote a culture of empirical evidence.

In terms of teaching, neutrality helps the instructor to try and present material in an unbiased and objective way; it also prevents the students from simply rejecting knowledge because they do not like the beliefs or the politics of the instructor. Just as it is difficult for a scientist to remain neutral and avoid all prejudices and self-interest, it takes effort for a teacher to use introspection to avoid bias. I have used my training as a psychoanalyst to try to attain and maintain neutrality in the classroom. This turn to psychoanalysis has confirmed for me why neutrality is necessary for teaching.

Freud, Neutrality, and Free Association

Freud believed that the analyst should suspend any preconceptions and develop free-floating attention so that the patient could be free to express whatever came to his or her mind. Analytic neutrality allowed the patient to free associate and remove himself or herself from the “normal” mode of communication where the speaker engages in self-censorship and selective memory to bond with the listener. When Freud stopped sitting face-to-face with his patients, he realized that they were better able to speak without
trying to impress him or censor their illicit thoughts.

Freud also believed that the analyst should never play the role of the parent, authority, or savior. He moved away from his early position of being the “one who knows,” realizing that if interpretations only came from the analyst, the patient would become dependent on the analyst or reject the knowledge for being imposed or unconvincing. Freud discovered that patients productively changed their behavior if they thought the new idea came from within. The true driving force behind science was the affirmation of a lack of knowledge. In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud writes “That the scientific view of the universe no longer affords any room for human omnipotence; men have acknowledged their smallness and have submitted resignedly to death and to other necessities of nature” (88). As with modern science, one has to give up the belief in omnipotent knowledge. Freud and Descartes both believed that a discourse of discovery must begin with the analyst’s or teacher’s

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declaration of non-knowledge.

Teaching, Neutrality, and Ideology

In teaching, one can help to keep learning alive by following a theory of neutrality to try and avoid students thinking only what the teacher wants them to think or rebelling against a teacher with a different ideology. After all, students from a very early age are socialized by figuring out what the teacher values and desires. Especially in the context of a competitive grading system, students will often conform to the teacher, having been trained that if they want to succeed, they should tell the teacher what they want to hear even if the student does not believe in the value of the knowledge they are internalizing. According to this logic, a teacher may get students to comply with a set of values or beliefs, but outside the classroom, they may disavow those ideas.

I am not arguing here that educators should not involve themselves in the political arena outside of the classroom; rather, their teaching should always attempt to be neutral because, without this effort to follow the necessary but unrealized ideals of reason, we will end up devaluing neutrality and rationality. Therefore, if we want to introduce our students to university thinking, we must advocate for those ethical ideals that shape the modern investment in neutrality. Moreover, even though many people view science as not having a moral foundation, I believe that the goals of being open, honest, and empirical shape the ethics of secular humanism. The problem is that we rarely discuss these ideals with our students.

The Critique of Neutrality

Counter to the idea that teachers stay neutral, we find a growing consensus that neutrality is not only impossible but also counterproductive. For instance, in “Turning Resistances into Engagement,” authors Erika Johnson and Tawny LeBouef Tullia present the following argument: “Our proclaimed identities… compel us to turn resistances into engagement because we possess neither the privilege nor the professional capacity to engage in performances of neutrality. Thus, we define neutrality as both ambiguity and erasure of who we are and who we choose to be; it is inauthentic” (in Daniel P. Richards, ed., On Teacher Neutrality: Praxis, Politics, and Performativity, 2020, 225). This criticism of neutrality stems from the idea that it is unnatural and impersonal to take on this position. But shouldn’t we affirm that, by definition, neutrality is based on a shared universal ideal, which has itself been socially constructed? Rather than affirming the artificial nature of neutrali-

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ty, theorists and teachers now reject impartiality because they see it as fake and illusory: “We take Freire’s condemnation of neutral to mean that neutrality is an illusion… which exists in direct contrast to our goals here” (Johnson and Tullia in Richards, 225). Instead of realizing the connection between equal justice and impartiality, these authors insist that neutrality by definition serves to subjugate people who lack power. However, I would contend that what has protected many disempowered people is precisely the neutrality of the law and the universality of rights. Even though these ideals are not always maintained, they create a social possibility for equal
justice. Furthermore, we have to ask: If teachers do not believe in treating their students equally, what will protect these students from the personal whims of the instructors?

Free Speech

One contemporary common reason for rejecting both neutrality and objectivity is to argue that the classroom should be a space where everyone is free to voice his or her opinions: “We enact a free speech or rather an open-door policy that quashes no line of inquiry” (Johnson and Tullia in Richards, 230). Although this Democratic call for totally free speech seems to promote neutrality, in reality, the students are being allowed to reject neutrality by expressing whatever they want to say without removing their self-interest and prejudices.

In referring to the work of Susan Jarratt, Meghan Brewer posits that neutrality in the classroom is so destructive because it “leaves those who adopt it insufficiently prepared to negotiate the oppressive discourses of racism, sexism, and classism surfacing in the composition classroom” (“The Limits of Neutrality: How New Graduate Instructors Negotiate Politics, Race, and Ideology in the Composition Classroom,” in Richards, 34). But this argument fails to appreciate the necessary but impossible ideals of equality, impartiality, and objectivity. A teacher can’t correct all of the social ills circulating in a culture but can try to create a safe space where these destructive prejudices are reduced if not eliminated. Unfortunately, some teachers believe that they need to resolve the problems of the world by making their classroom an ideal community; yet they often turn the educational environment into a highly antagonistic one with no space for reconciliation.

This desire to see the classroom as a political space is evident among teachers who adopt a political agenda. One can detect this in the following statement and statements like it “We teach be-

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cause we want to change the world. As intersectional feminists, we teach to dismantle white supremacy, rape culture, transphobia, and xenophobia. We believe our most deeply transformational social justice work (on-campus) takes place in the classroom.”  Furthermore, “We believe that U.S. edited academic English—and the ways we teach and assess it—bears the marks of white supremacy. We are suspicious of the concept of neutrality because we believe that it rests too closely to complicity” (Lauren F. Lichty and Karen Rosenberg, “Ideology Through Process and Slow-Start Pedagogy: Co-Constructing the Path of Least Resistance in the Social Justice Writing Classroom,” in Richards, 2020, 127).

In reading this passage, it is important to connect the critique of neutrality with the rejection of teaching “US edited academic English.” Since these teachers do not believe that they should help students write standard academic prose or try to take a neutral position in the classroom, they are free to use the course for their political purposes. It is precisely this attitude that the Right has been able to attack to undermine the public’s respect for higher education.

What is so interesting in this rejection of neutrality is that it also explicitly refutes the idea that composition instructors should help their students become better academic writers. Quoting Mike Rose, “In asking students to co-create our learning community, we render the hidden curriculum and ‘language of exclusion’” (Christopher Michael Brown, “Believing Critically: Teaching Critical Thinking through the Conversion Narrative,” in Richards, 126). Although it sounds progressive to argue that students should help the teacher co-create the learning community, this rhetoric excludes the importance of the teacher’s expertise and the value of empirical reasoning. While democracy and science are both monolithic institutions, science cannot function as a purely democratic process.

As an extreme form of postmodern relativism, these educational critics confuse an open scientific discourse with the freedom of everyone to simply affirm their opinions and ideologies. As Christopher Michael Brown says, “A pedagogy that enabled students to develop lines of inquiry from the premises of their own ideologies would stimulate critical thinking by remaining ‘neutral’ toward those ideologies” (in Richards, 114). Here, neutrality is misrepresented as a method to reject any attempt at validating facts, since students are encouraged to simply replicate internalized ideo-

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logies. Instead of using the scientific method to impartially judge the facts of a subject, the call is to validate what the students already believe. This argument discredits neutrality and reason by simply affirming the prejudices and already established beliefs of the students. As a reaction to the postmodern desire to show how all of our beliefs are structured by social ideologies, it is now common for teachers to begin with an affirmation of the presuppositions and prejudices of the students.

One way to work on this question of the relation between popular culture and student subjectivity in the future is to decode the rhetoric of contemporary media productions. What is essential to this pedagogical task is the constant focus on using evidence, reason, logic, and impartiality in our attempts to apply academic thinking to cultural representations.

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