Mayes 2009

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The psychoanalytic view of teaching

and learning, 1922–2002
a
Clifford Mayes
a
Department of Educational Leadership and Foundations ,
Brigham Young University , Provo, Utah, 84602, USA
Published online: 16 Jun 2009.
To cite this article: Clifford Mayes (2009) The psychoanalytic view of teaching and learning,
1922–2002, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 41:4, 539-567, DOI: 10.1080/00220270802056674
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220270802056674
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J. CURRICULUM STUDIES, 2009, VOL. 41, NO. 4, 539–567
The psychoanalytic view of teaching and learning,

1922–2002
CLIFFORD MAYES
Various psychoanalysts have written about the implications of psychoanalytic theory for
Journal
10.1080/00220270802056674
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cliff_mayes@byu.edu
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teaching and learning. Although many curriculum scholars have offered their personal inter-
pretations of the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to education, there is very little in the
educational literature about what psychoanalysts themselves have had to say about the acts of
Downloaded by [University of Victoria] at 09:29 19 November 2014
teaching and learning since the rise (and, some would suggest, decline) of psychoanalysis
over the last century. This study examines a wide range of educational themes that emerge
from a reading of various psychoanalysts over the last eight decades. In general, the psycho-
analysts argue that, in order to be existentially authentic, teaching and learning must involve
the teacher and student in all their psychodynamic complexity as emotional and ethical
beings. I also examine the psychodynamic concepts of transference, counter-transference,
and object relations in some depth because they have figured prominently in psychoanalytic
discourse about education.
Keywords: learning; object relations; pedagogy; psychoanalysis; teaching;

transference
Although there is a small but lively conversation among curricular theorists

today about the educational uses of psychoanalytic theory in the public
school classroom (Block 1997, Britzman 2003), there has been very little
written about what psychoanalysts have had to say on this subject—and
virtually nothing on this topic for the last several decades or so. I wish to
examine some of the major curricular statements by psychoanalysts and
psychoanalytic theorists from 1922–2002—from the early heyday of
psychoanalytic theory to its present problematic status (Rieff 1987,
Homans 1989).
Several conclusions will emerge from this examination. First, it will be
seen that these psychoanalytic writers almost universally lament what they
perceive to be either a misuse or lack of use of their ideas in the standard US
public-school classroom. Whether or not this has actually been true of the
classroom practices of teachers in US public schools is not clear, although
one strongly suspects that it is, given the fact that psychoanalytic education
has never played a significant role in the preparation of US teachers except
in a very few cases.1 At any rate, for the psychoanalysts who have written
about education, there has been no doubt in their minds that their passion-
ate pleas for certain changes in curriculum and instruction have mostly
Clifford Mayes is a professor of education in the Department of Educational Leadership and

Foundations, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602, USA; e-mail: cliff_mayes@
byu.edu. His most recent books are Jung and Education: Elements of an Archetypal Pedagogy
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), and Inside Education: Depth Psychology in Teach-
ing and Learning (Madison, WI: Atwood, 2007).
Journal of Curriculum Studies ISSN 0022–0272 print/ISSN 1366–5839 online ©2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/00220270802056674
540 C. MAYES
fallen on deaf ears in and around US public schools. Despite their despair at
the actual pedagogical implementation of their ideas, psychoanalysts have
tirelessly continued throughout the eight decades under analysis to spill a
great deal of ink on the educational suitability of certain psychoanalytic
concepts and techniques to the classroom. Furthermore, the concepts and
techniques which these writers have illustrated and advocated have
remained fairly constant over the last 80 years. Finally, I examine these
concepts and techniques in some depth in order to understand their psycho-
analytic foundations and pedagogical value.
I begin with a brief review of some of the basic ideas in classical psycho-
analytic theory that figure into psychoanalytic pedagogy. This will be
followed by a presentation of the major educational statements by psycho-
analysts from Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Anna Freud (1895–1982),
Melanie Klein (1882–1960), and other classical psychoanalysts in the

first half of the 20th century to the later iterations of such object-relations
theorists as Heinz Kohut (1913–1981), D. W. Winnicott (1896–1971), and
W. R. D. Fairbairn (1889–1964) in the latter half of that century, where the
focus changes dramatically from sexuality as the prime psychic motivator to
the need for meaningful and nurturing relationship as the fundamental fact
of the psychic economy (Eagle 1993).
Classical psychoanalysis and education
Freudian psychology has fallen into both academic and popular disfavour
in many circles, largely because of its perceived emphasis on the sexual
origin of psychological problems. As I will show, this critique of Freudian
theory, though undoubtedly true of classical psychoanalysis as initially
defined by Freud and his circle of disciples, does not do justice to the full
range of psychoanalysis as it has evolved in the second half of the 20th
century. Indeed, as early as 1914, Freud (1957b: 106) had already admit-
ted the possibility that there were ‘various points in favour of the hypothesis
of a primordial differentiation between sexual instincts and other instincts,
ego instincts’. It is these ‘ego instincts’ that would become the primary
focus of later psychoanalytic thought and therapy. As Freud’s thinking
evolved, he gave increasing attention to the birth, structure, and vicissitudes
of the ego, which he increasingly came to view as a dynamic field of energy,
one whose shifting range of memories, perspectives, dispositions, and
capacities comprised conscious awareness. The ego, as the individual’s tool
for dealing with the natural and social worlds, worked in the service of the
reality principle.
Neurosis was the failure of the ego to mediate the on-going battle between
one’s animalistic drives—embodying the pleasure principle—and the
personal and social roles one must play in the service of the reality principle.
Typically, the ego dealt with the essentially anti-social, feral desires of the id
by banishing them from conscious awareness to the subconscious. However,
because psychic energy was, in Freud’s 19th-century mechanistic worldview,
analogous to energy as reified in classical physics, it was impossible to elim-
inate this psychic ‘substance’ simply by pushing it out of awareness. Rather,
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW OF TEACHING AND LEARNING, 1922–2002 541
as was true with any dammed-up energy, these banished impulses would
constantly clamour for conscious recognition and physical expression, and
all the more so as they had been violently negated by the ego because of the
demands of the superego—the social conventions that the individual had
internalized during his early development. In his later work ‘The ego and the
id’ (Freud 1957a), he claimed that the superego was, like the id, a mostly
subconscious psychic entity.
As is well known, the overall topographical picture of the psyche that
finally emerged was three-layered: the id (which was amoral), the ego
(which strove to be ‘moral’ while also gaining as much instinctual gratifi-
cation as possible), and the superego (which was hyper-moral). Given the
fact that both id and superego functioned mostly outside of the range of
conscious awareness, Freud (1957a: 230) wryly observed that ‘the normal
man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral
than he has any idea of’. All of these tensions—between the ego and the
id, the id and superego, and the ego and the superego—could sometimes
be consciously suppressed and thereby controlled. However, when this
was unsuccessful, the only alternatives were either repression or sublima-
tion. Repression was the attempt to keep the passions of the libido entirely
out of the circle of conscious awareness so that the ego would not be scan-
dalized or paralysed by having to look directly at its own hidden darkness.
This subconscious strategy was often unsuccessful because repressed
energy would ultimately press to the surface in the painful form of
neurotic symptoms—a reaction formation. The healthier alternative, and
the goal of therapy, was sublimation, in which the psyche strategically
allowed forbidden energy to express itself in a much reduced, highly
symbolic, and therefore socially acceptable form. Most psychoanalysts
concerned with education have maintained throughout the 20th century
that the goal of education should be the socially normative sublimation of
libidinal energy.
Freud pessimistically concluded that we as human beings are all more
or less caught in an ultimately irresolvable tension between biological
instincts and social institutions. This will always be so, said Freud, for
we are all animals with passions that must be forcibly cornered and
corralled with symbols and sublimations if we are to find ways, as he put
it in a now famous phrase, ‘to love and to work’. There is simply no way
out of this quandary. Individually and collectively, we survive only
through the protection that society offers, but social cohesion cannot be
achieved without the suppression, repression, and sublimation of the id.
The depth of Freud’s despair at our incurably paradoxical condition
deepened as he aged. In 1923, he somberly portrayed the ego as ‘a poor
creature owing service to three masters and consequently menaced by
three dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id, and
from the severity of the superego’ (Freud 1957a: 232). The best that
therapy could accomplish was to help the individual attain the normal
state of functional neurosis in which the average person perforce lives, not
the state of pathological neurosis in which the patient was a problem for
his family, friends, associates, and, above all, society at large (Rieff 1961,
Ellenberger 1970).
542 C. MAYES
The transference and the counter-transference
An essential element of the therapeutic process is the transference. Greenson

(1990: 151) has summarized the classical view of the transference as:
the experiencing of feelings, drives, attitudes, fantasies, and defenses toward a
person in the present which are inappropriate to that person and are a repeti-
tion, a displacement of reactions originating in regard to significant persons of
early childhood.
The transference is, as Freud (1970: 462) put it, ‘a new edition’ of an old
problem—a repetition compulsion in which the patient projects issues from
early childhood onto the psychotherapist, usually involving parents or other
immediate caregivers. The goal of therapy—and the tricky task of the thera-
pist—is to work with the patient’s transferences in a way that will finally
resolve the issues that underlie the transference, thereby eliminating the
need for adult repetition of the original problem. The analyst must be able
to ‘contain’ the transference neurosis—that is, the projections of the patient
onto him or her—in such a way that the patient can play the old issues out
again, but this time resolve them satisfactorily in the consulting room. In a
sense, therefore, the relationship between the analyst and patient is more
important to a cure than any particular theoretical orientations or technical
skills that the therapist possesses. ‘The outcome in this struggle is not
decided by [the patient’s] intellectual insight—it is neither strong enough
nor free enough to accomplish such a thing—but solely by his relationship
with the physician’ (Freud 1970: 453).2 Freud (1990: 32) spoke of the trans-
ference as being either syntonic or dystonic—either positive or negative:
We must make up our minds to distinguish a ‘positive’ transference from a
‘negative’ one, the transference of affectionate feelings from that of hostile
ones, and to treat the two sorts of transference to the doctor separately.
The perils and potentials of transference in the analysis are so central to
the whole endeavour that Henderson (1967) has called the transference the
pièce de résistance of psychoanalysis. Freud himself is reported to have heartily
approved of Jung’s (1965) characterization of the transference as ‘the alpha
and omega’ of therapy.
The transference is not a one-way street. Just as the patient projects
psychic material onto the analyst, so the analyst may (and perhaps inevitably
does) project his or her psychic issues back onto the patient. This is known
as the counter-transference, and it can be especially powerful if the patient is
projecting psychic energy onto the analyst that touches one of the analyst’s
own psychic wounds. ‘If the analyst is not aware of his or her own shadow
response, real harm can be done’ as the analyst projects his or her issues back
onto the unsuspecting and vulnerable patient (Woodman 1995: 54).
Furthermore, the analyst’s counter-transference is not always just a response
to the patient’s projections but may also arise more or less independently of
the patient’s issues and projections.
Although Freud never really stopped viewing the counter-transference as
a problem (he would have preferred the analyst to be a ‘scientifically dispas-
sionate’ observer in the therapeutic dyad of doctor–patient), even he ultimately
had to admit its power. With this recognition, he began to insist on a training
analysis for all prospective analysts in which they would themselves be psycho-
analysed. It was not until the late 1940s, close to the time of Freud’s death,
that the psychoanalytic movement began to show a widespread interest in the
counter-transference and its therapeutic possibilities.3
The roots of psychoanalysis
It would be a mistake to conclude that Freud somehow spun his model of

the psyche in the comfort of his own study and out of the depths of his own
imagination. True, Freud conducted a self-analysis and found these things
within himself (Rieff 1961), but one would have to be suspicious of any
theory about the depths of the psyche that did not intuitively resonate with
the theorist’s own inner experience. Freud’s theory developed incremen-
tally—based upon his self-analysis and daily clinical practice. Furthermore,
in presenting his model of the psyche, Freud was in many ways simply
systematizing the considerable body of research into the unconscious and its
sexual nature that preceded him by at least a century and with which he was
intimately familiar. There is no denying either Freud’s genius or importance,
but researchers must be careful to avoid the misconception that Freud had
somehow single-handedly ‘discovered’ the unconscious. Almost all of the
elements of Freudian psychiatry had already been postulated and explored
by researchers for many decades—and in some instances even a century—
before Freud’s first sexological works in the late 1890s and early 1900s
(Ellenberger 1970). Not only Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), Pierre
Janet (1859–1947), and Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) but also many
other psychiatrists, psychologists, philosophers, poets, and even sociologists
had argued for the existence of a subconscious whose nature was primarily,
even exclusively, sexual.
In the last phase of his writing and practice, Freud would expand the
notion of id and libido considerably, calling them Eros and depicting it as a
sort of generalized life-instinct (still deeply involved with sexuality, of
course, but probably not completely reducible to it) which was constantly
doing battle with a death-instinct that he called Thanatos—or the desire of
every creature to return to an undifferentiated state of eternal rest in the
primal ground of being. In this war, death must inevitably triumph. ‘The
goal of all life is death’, declared Freud (1957c: 160, emphases removed) in
‘Beyond the pleasure-principle’, for ‘[t]he inanimate was there before the
animate’.
Psychoanalysis in the schools: great expectations, meagre results
In the opening two decades of the 20th century, there were great expecta-
tions among such well-known Freudians as Anna Freud, Melanie Klein,
Susan Isaacs (1885–1948), August Aichhorn (1878–1951), and Oskar
Pfister (1873–1956)—all of whom had themselves been educators before
becoming psychoanalysts—regarding the potential of psychoanalysis to
544 C. MAYES
reshape educational goals and practices. Their hope was that teachers,
through adequate psychological training and their own psychoanalyses,
would be able to teach and interact with students in ways that not only
conveyed knowledge but would also be emotionally beneficial, even thera-
peutic, to the students in their care. Indeed, G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924)—
one of the most important turn-of-the-century US psychologists, the author
of the educationally influential study Adolescence (Hall 1904) and a founder
of the Child Study Movement—hosted Freud and his then-premier disciple,
Carl Jung, at Clark University for a series of lectures in 1905. 4 Pfister (1922:
173), one of the early members of Freud’s inner circle, called Hall ‘the cele-
brated psychologer [sic] of youth and religion who rallied around psycho-
analysis’. The potential for cross-fertilization between psychoanalysis and
pedagogy appeared great, and would soon (so it was thought) blossom in the
form of new practices in classrooms across the US at all levels of instruction.

The psychotherapeutic wing of US Progressive education largely arose out
of this hope (Zachry 1929, Cremin 1961).
The core idea was simple: the teacher, although certainly not a therapist,
should nevertheless learn enough about psychoanalysis to know how to
guide students in their interactions with each other, with the curriculum,
and with the teacher himself or herself so that their unhealthy inhibitions
could be overcome and, at the same time, their libido could be harnessed in
socially normative and constructive ways—a goal that has ever been promi-
nent among psychoanalysts writing about education. ‘From this point of
view’, wrote Caroline Zachry (1894–1945), the chairman of the Study of
Adolescents Division of the Progressive Education Association:
It becomes the duty of the school to discover the causal elements in the
child’s conduct and so to guide him that his personality and emotional adjust-
ments will be constructive and thus he will be helped properly to face social
situations.5 Zachry 1929: 3
In her ‘Four lectures on psychoanalysis for teachers and parents’, Freud
(1974: 128) echoed this theme when she noted that the educator, like the
parent, needed to bear in mind that:
the task of upbringing based on analytic understanding is to find a middle road
between … extremes—that is to say, to find for each stage in the child’s life the
right proportion between drive gratification and drive control.
A psychologically healthy and therapeutically knowledgeable teacher
could help the student find a balance between the rapacious id and the unfor-
giving superego. Such a teacher would also know how to draw those students
who had fallen into the underworld of juvenile delinquency back into the
broad, sunlit fold of socio-cultural normality and productivity. This notion
of ‘mental hygiene’ in the schools was quite elaborately presented in such
studies as Pfister’s (1922) Psycho-analysis in the Service of Education, Aich-
horn’s (1951) Wayward Youth, Isaacs’s (1932) The Children We Teach,
Zachry and Lighty’s (1940) Emotion and Conduct in Adolescence, and perhaps
most powerfully of all in Redl and Wattenberg’s (1951) classic, Mental
Hygiene in Teaching. Nevertheless, as Hilgard (1987: 688) concluded in his
magisterial study of the evolution of academic and clinical psychology in the
US, there was at most only an ‘indirect influence of psychoanalysis on

elementary education[;] the direct influence was meagre, at least before
World War II’. In secondary education, where social expectations, economic
demands, and academic stakes were higher, attention to the student’s inner
life was even scantier. Thus, Zachry (1929: 252) lamented that although
‘physical hygiene is avowedly the concern of school authorities[,] [w]ith
mental hygiene they have, as yet shown little concern’.
After World War II, as the general public witnessed in the faces of the
men returning from combat undeniable evidence of just how deeply the
psyche could be traumatized, there was a resurgence of interest in depth
psychology (Jansz and van Drunen 2004). Feeding this renewed interest was
the fact that the US was now becoming home to a cohort of psychoanalytic
luminaries who were immigrating in the late 1940s and 1950s from war-
ravaged Europe to write and work in universities and clinics across the coun-
try. Some of these psychoanalysts, such as Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990)
and Erik Erikson (1902–1994), even had particular interest in and messages
for educational theorists and practitioners (Hilgard 1987). Despite these
powerful influences, however, the effect of depth psychology on education,
at least in the public school classroom, seems to have remained surprisingly
limited after World War II in elementary classrooms and even more so in
secondary ones. It was behaviourism (as presented in Skinner’s (1956) The
Technology of Teaching) and, later, cognitive developmentalism (as presented
in Piaget and Inhelder’s (1969) classic, The Psychology of the Child) that
reigned triumphant then, and that have continued to have the greatest effect
on the public school classroom (Cremin 1988).
In 1951, for instance, Redl and Wattenberg (1951: ix) expressed surprise
that, despite its potential to create more joy in teaching and more excitement
in learning, the mental hygiene movement had still not made a noticeable
impact on school policies or practices. A few years later, Watson (1975)
pointed to the extremely limited role that psychoanalysis was still playing in
education. ‘Freud’s influence has filtered into teacher education by indirec-
tion’, he wrote. ‘Teachers are undoubtedly being exhorted to study the causes
of emotionally disturbed behaviour, but few are yet being give the necessary
tools and training’ (p. 33). Kubie (1967: 62), an important learning theorist
in the 1960s, observed in even more dire tones that ‘self-knowledge, which
requires the mastery of new tools of psychological explanation, is wholly over-
looked throughout the entire scheme of “modern education”, from kinder-
garten to the highest levels of academic training’. Both Laux (1967) and Jones
(1968) remarked that, as yet, the findings of psychoanalysis found expression
in the schools only in the case of children with particularly pronounced
emotional problems, requiring separate treatment. Tyler (1975: 55) picked
up the same complaint in the next decade, declaring that:
[p]sychoanalytic theory has been in existence for a half-century, yet no attempt
has been made to utilize it in any systematic way for curriculum development
or for understanding curricular effectiveness.
It seemed that, although ‘bits and pieces’ of psychoanalytic theory were
employed in the school, there was nothing systematic or substantial to be
found there. Some psychoanalytic critics of public education even discerned
546 C. MAYES
in the schools’ reluctance to embrace psychoanalysis an ‘unconscious resis-

tance’ among policy-makers and principals (Kirman 1977: 160).
Adding to the persistent neglect of psychodynamic educational theory in
both teacher education and public education is the fact that in the last two
or three decades, social constructivism, which views consciousness as a
product of interpersonal dynamics and not primarily an individual intrapsy-
chic affair, has become visible in scholarly research and writing (Rogoff
2003). Moreover, neither cognitive nor social constructivism tend to be very
interested in the subconscious or unconscious workings of the psyche or how
these dynamics might affect curriculum and instruction. 6 The great curric-
ularist Tyler (1989: 142) thus concluded in 1989 that ‘even today, this
general approval of affective objectives in the school curriculum is not wide-
spread among parents and other community members’. And as late as 2002,
Barford (2002b: 42) could still bemoan the fact that in teacher education, it
is behaviourism, cognitivism, and humanism that are studied, completely
overlooking what psychoanalysis has to offer both the prospective and prac-
tising teacher. Indeed, psychoanalysis has probably had its limited effect on
public education over the last 50 years or so mostly through the impact
exerted by its philosophical cousin, humanistic psychology, which provided
much of the foundation for the call for existentially ‘relevant’ curricula in the
1960s and the Open Classroom Movement of the 1970s (Silberman 1973,
Forbes 2003).
On-going psychoanalytic themes regarding the

improvement of curriculum and instruction
Together, both Piagetian cognitive constructivism and Vygotskyan social

constructivism performed a great service in freeing education from behav-
iourism’s cold grip in teacher education and, to a probably more limited
extent, in the public schools. However, in the view of the psychoanalysts, the
constructivists do not give enough attention to the psychodynamic factors
involved in learning. Following is a presentation of what psychoanalysts
have—in a remarkably consistent fashion over the last eight decades—
presented as their most important suggestions for creating a psychodynami-
cally rich and healthy pedagogy.
Go beyond a merely cognitive approach in order to understand the

complexities of teaching and learning
Perhaps the most persistent general theme in psychoanalytic pedagogy has

been that, although it is undoubtedly necessary to look at the cognitive
developmental stage of a child in order to understand how he or she learns,
it is a great mistake to think educators can understand learning only by look-
ing at that. As early as 1922, Oskar Pfister warned that a student’s attitude
toward school in general or a specific subject—even a specific assignment—
may be related to deeper psychological issues (he called them ‘unconscious
educators’) that are troubling the child and preventing him or her from fully
engaging with the subject matter at hand. A student who has frequently been
beaten by his or her father may find it very difficult to study a chapter in a
history textbook that deals with mediaeval torture or the treatment of slaves
in the US South. The teacher sees only a student who refuses to do a home-
work assignment, but the student’s resistance is much more painful and
complex than that. ‘When I glance back over my earlier educational activity’,
mused Pfister (1922: 29–30) in his characteristically hortatory style,
I see among my pupils more than one who was in a medical sense healthy, but
who has since perished for lack of help, but whom I could not help because
I did not know him and the methods which alone could save him! And is it not
most painful to be compelled to say to oneself, ‘A young soul was entrusted to
your care, whom you might have saved if your horizon had not been so narrow,
your power so limited’. I see about me boundless misery. We should be experts
in things educational. We are consulted on many difficult educational points.

We should not be merely teachers, but also liberators, enlargers of youthful
strength and joy, moulders of men in the highest meaning of the term. But,
honestly, are we such experts, familiar with the instrument [of basic psychoan-
alytic knowledge] indispensable for this purpose? Many men know more of
beetles and mushrooms than … of the child mind. Can he be called a trained
educator who cannot distinguish between an obsessional liar and a morally
feeble-minded one?
In similar strains, Zachry (1929: 272) advised teachers that they should
teach ‘the child as a whole realizing that it is the child that she is teaching
and that subject matter is a means toward his growth—not an end in itself’.
The teacher who takes this more psychologically sophisticated view of his or
her students, trying to understand their ‘personality problems’, will see that
those problems are not ‘something apart from her work, but … essentially
part of it’. The child’s emotional and intellectual development are so inter-
twined that ‘success in one is contingent upon success in the other’. In 1940,
Peter Blos (1903–1997) (Blos 1941: 492) made the commonsensical but
often overlooked point that ‘no two children in a classroom are having
exactly the same experience’. This is because ‘[t]he past and present experi-
ences of the individual’, having shaped his psyche, will necessarily determine
his emotional response to subject-matter—’the meaning it will have for him,
his ability to accept it, and the purpose it will serve in his total development’.
‘[T]he child does not react solely with his intellect to mental operations but
needs to reinforce them with personal meanings and urgencies which are
related to them’ (p. 494), and this will happen only if the child is able to ‘find
in the nature of the subject-matter, in the mental processes involved, or in
the personality of the teacher some positive contribution to his emotional
needs. Failing this he will be ineffective’ (pp. 496–497).
Peller (1978), whose goal was to combine the pedagogical wisdom of
Montessori with the psychological wisdom of Freud, expanded upon Blos’s
theme in 1946. She insisted that to understand the way a student internalizes
knowledge teachers must consider:
[the student’s] deep and contradicting emotions, his intellectual power, his
fears, his ability for keen observation as well as for denying unpleasant facts,
his reactions to frustrations, his anticipation of his adult role. Without this
complex basis of reaction the child’s development would not differ essentially
548 C. MAYES
from the results of animal training, and the child would not undergo transmu-
tation into an ethical and social being (p. 54).
Beginning in the 1950s, one sees in the psychoanalytic literature the
increasing use of the term ‘self-esteem’ (Symonds 1951: 189). Yet, this was
not just a warm and fuzzy agenda of helping the child ‘feel good about
himself’, as conservative critics often aver (Adler 1982). It made good peda-
gogical sense because children with high self-esteem tended to be more intel-
lectually curious and creative (Pearson 1954).
What is more, intuition and emotion, so essential to creativity, are both
grounded in the unconscious. Ignoring the unconscious can only cripple the
student’s creativity. Given this extremely subtle interaction of thought and
emotion, the behaviourist glorification of instructional technologies—even to
the point of advocating the replacement of the teacher by a machine (Skinner
1956)—was shown by the psychoanalytic pedagogues, as instructionally

absurd, psychologically destructive, and ethically unacceptable.
Indeed, ‘even when a scientist is studying atomic energy or a biological
process or the chemical properties of some isotope’, he or she is still engaged
in various levels of emotional activity. Consciously, of course, the scientist
deals with his or her subjects ‘as realities’. However, ‘on the preconscious
level [the transitional area between waking and sleeping], he deals with their
allegorical and emotional import, direct and indirect’. What is more, at the
deepest unconscious levels of his or her psyche, the waking realities of
‘biological processes, chemical properties, and isotopes’ become even more
enmeshed in the scientist’s own complex emotional dynamics. ‘On an
unconscious level, without realizing it’, the scientist’s unconscious mind
translates his or her subject matter into its own symbolic language, which
will invariably ‘express the unconscious, conflict-laden, and confused level
of his own spirit, using the language of his specialty as a vehicle for the
projection of his internal struggles’ (Kubie 1967: 63).
Jones (1968: 82), in his important study Fantasy and Feeling in Education,
critiqued Bruner’s (1968) then widely popular theory of instruction, which
had arisen as a powerful and much praised rejoinder to the behaviourist
view, because Bruner’s model of learning, addressing cognitive processes
only, ignored the fact that learning should also be a passionate exercise in
emotional involvement with the subject matter. The whole student is
involved in learning, not just his or her ability to conceptualize, for his or her
imagination may well be involved in picturing:
how to conceive a squared root, a declined verb, a balanced equation, the
plural of ‘deer’; or the harshness of the Arctic environment, or the nature of
myth, or the varieties of human conflict regulation—or the meaning of infinity.
(Jones 1968: 82)
‘Let us enter it as a fundamental rule’, Jones (1968: 160) thus concluded,
‘that cultivation of emotional issues in classrooms, whether by design or in
response to the unpredictable, should be means to the ends of instructing the
children in the subject matter’.
In the following year, Ekstein and Motto (1969), in their groundbreak-
ing From Learning for Love to Love of Learning, picked up and elaborated on
Jones’s argument that the cognitive constructivist approach to learning did
not exclude a psychoanalytic approach. Ekstein (1969b) suggested that

combining the findings and techniques of both approaches would enrich an
understanding of how and why a student learns—or does not learn. Quoting
Kubie, he pointed out that:
[o]ur interest in the mind now is not only in terms of trying to clarify the
unconscious conflict which holds the child back, but to free the mental forces
which make it possible to solve problems and, particularly, to study the nature
of those cognitive functions which help us to contribute to the teaching of
problem-solving. (p. 111)
In making this seemingly radical suggestion, Ekstein was really proposing
no more than Piaget himself had in his important but generally ignored
caveat that ‘[t]he psychology of cognitive functions and psychoanalysis will
have to fuse in a general theory which will improve both, through mutual
correction’ (quoted in Anthony 1989: 117). For example, the highest stage
of cognitive development in Piaget’s model is the ‘formal operational stage’,
in which the person becomes able to evaluate critically the ethical and social
norms that define his or her culture. This requires a person to take a respon-
sibly independent stance with respect to that culture. Such autonomy
entails a fairly high degree of emotional stability and ethical courage.
[C]apacities to think abstractly, independently, and relativistically … demand
not only new cognitive structures, but finally a shift in locus of authority and
responsibility [onto the student] in learning. (Henderson and Kegan 1989:
286)
This accent on the synergistic possibilities of psychoanalytic and cogni-
tive approaches in the classroom has become even more pronounced in the
last several decades. Kirman (1977) contended that it was simply common-
sense to realize that the child’s emotional state would affect his or her learn-
ing, and that, in turn, the child’s ability to learn and do well in the classroom
would affect his or her emotional state. To illustrate this point, he noted that
in the best child-rearing practices in the home, ‘there is no artificial separa-
tion of the emotional and the intellectual. Neither should there be in the
classroom’ (p. vi). Indeed, learning at any stage of development, even the
very earliest, generally involves various intrapsychic and interactional
features. ‘From prenatal life and the early postnatal period, emotional,
social, and “cognitive” learning must be viewed as occurring together’. Any
educational programme should ‘begin at the “beginning” to support all
domains of “intelligence”’ (Greenspan 1989: 239).
In other words, just as there is an ‘official curriculum’ with essentially
cognitive goals that teachers then personally ‘operationalize’ in their own
unique ways (Eisner and Vallance 1985), so there is also an unofficial,
‘subjective curriculum’ (Cohler 1989: 52). The subjective curriculum refers
to how the student experiences the official and operational curricula. That
experience includes:
such factors as the child’s relationship with both teachers and fellow class-
mates, the personal significance of the curriculum, and the importance of a
sense of self as a requisite for taking on the challenge of new learning. (Cohler
1989: 57)
550 C. MAYES
The subjective curriculum may also include the teacher’s experiences:

[it is] in part, the invention of both teacher and students. Each one projects
distillates of his own inner perceptions and experiences, past and present, onto
the subject under study, be it mathematics, reading, history, or literature.
(Field 1989a: 853)
Teachers must always consider the possibility that a student’s seemingly

‘educational’ problems may primarily be psychodynamic ones, and this is
true for all students, not just those labelled as ‘emotionally disturbed’
Although it is undoubtedly true that ‘psychoanalytic inquiry regarding

education should focus both on factors interfering with learning [as well as]
those contributing to enhanced learning’ (Cohler 1989: 66), the fact is that
the focus of psychoanalytic educational theorists over the last eight decades
has been mostly on educational problems. That this was the case from the
very beginning of the interaction of psychoanalysis and education should not
be surprising, perhaps, because Freudian psychology was born of an attempt
to understand and treat psychological illnesses, especially neuroses. 7
Many of Melanie Klein’s patients were children whose presenting issues
related to school (Hall 2002: 24). Klein (1975: 100) believed that Oedipal
neuroses in children ‘show themselves, among other things, in excessive
educational difficulties’. Fenichel (1897–1946), a very important psychoan-
alyst in the 1940s, observed that it was generally true that:
[i]n carrying out a ‘work of learning’ or ‘’work of adjustment’, [a person]
must acknowledge the new and less comfortable reality and fight tendencies
toward regression, toward the misinterpretation of reality, toward the long-
ing for passivity and dependence, toward wish-fulfilling fantasies. (Fenichel
1945: 554)
Six years later Redl and Wattenberg (1951: 51–70) developed this theme
with their taxonomy of various neurotic ‘mechanisms’ that ‘inhibit learning’
in children, listing many specific dysfunctions under the general diagnostic
headings of ‘mechanisms of denial’, ‘mechanisms of escape’, and ‘mecha-
nisms of shift and substitution’. To name just a few of these psychic ‘mech-
anisms’ of learning-inhibition, there are: specific emotional blocks relating
to a particular subject (i.e. a boy who has trouble studying about a famous
person’s mother because of a troubled relationship with his own mother),
free-floating anxiety (which can attach itself to a specific topic or activity in
the classroom for no apparent reason), and sibling rivalry at home (which
can result in a child constantly clamouring for the teacher’s attention in a
classroom).
A general theme in the decade following Fenichel’s studies was that
learning problems were often seen as the neurotic result of some sort of
conflict between the ego and superego, on one hand, or between the ego and
id, on the other hand (Pearson 1954). An example of the former would be a
female child whose perfectionist parents expect so much of her academically
that she develops severe performance-anxiety and cannot perform well, or
even perform at all. An example of the latter would be a male child who,
having been psycho-sexually enmeshed with his mother in an Oedipal situa-

tion, has such conflicting attitudes about his female teacher, on whom he has
projected his mother-image, that his attitude and behaviour toward the
teacher are unpredictable, overly emotional, and prevent him from partici-
pating appropriately in classroom activities. Indeed, such a child, harbouring
sadistic fantasies about his mother, may not only act them out in classroom
misbehaviour but may also find ways to incite the class to take part in a joint,
destructive flight of unconscious sadistic fantasy against the teacher (Kirman
1977). Teachers should also be aware, it was thought, that students of any
age who suffer from a heavy burden of guilt and a consequent need to be
punished may invite castigation from the teacher by acting up and acting out
in class in a wide variety of ways. ‘Forewarned is forearmed’, might be the
slogan of the psychoanalytically prepared teacher (Pearson 1954).
The origin of these and related problems may lie in the child’s earliest
experience of its mother and breast-feeding (Ekstein and Motto 1969). After
all, do people not often speak of learning in gustatory terms? One ‘devours’
a book, ‘consumes’ information, ‘chews’ on new ideas, tries to get ‘the
flavour’ of an argument that somebody has ‘brewed’ or ‘cooked up’, takes
time to ‘digest’ facts or concepts, and sometimes is even required to ‘regur-
gitate’ knowledge on tests. Surely these colloquial parallelisms are not gratu-
itous but reflect a fundamental tie between taking in abstract pieces of
knowledge cognitively and taking in nutrients physically. Considering how
much a baby learns of its world in its first feeding encounters with its
mother—whether the world is safe, full, and soothing, or whether it is unpre-
dictable, unsatisfying, and cold—one can appreciate Ekstein’s (1969a: 49)
surprising suggestion that:
the first curriculum struggle ever developed does not take place in school but
rather ensues between mother and infant as she is nursing her baby. The full
breast is the first curriculum the baby must empty and digest in order to meet
the goal and requirement of satiation.
Regarding another developmental issue, if toilet-training is not handled
well—if, for instance, the parent is impatient with the child, severe in
handling him or her, openly disgusted with the whole process in general—
the child ‘learns’ that he or she is also disgusting and that his or her prod-
ucts—‘what comes out of him’ (first physically, then conceptually)—are
bad, inadequate, and a cause for shame. The classroom consequences of this
may include underperformance and blocked creativity, despite inborn
talents (Kirman 1977).
Moreover, developmental damage to the child at any stage may impede
that ‘courage to try’ and ‘courage to learn’ which are vital to intellectual
growth (Cohler 1989: 49, 53). ‘No matter how great the opportunity, moti-
vation, or innate capacity, no learning will occur unless the individual finds
within himself the courage to try’ (Bernstein 1989: 143). The child who has
trouble putting together a project for a science fair may be scientifically
gifted but developmentally wounded. This theme, so prominent in psycho-
analytic pedagogical literature from its earliest days on into the 1970s,
continued to be emphasized and explored later on, perhaps in the greatest
detail in Field et al.’s (1989) text in psychoanalytic pedagogy, Psychoanalytic
552 C. MAYES
Perspectives on Learning. There, the critical point was made that not only does
a child’s development affect his or experience of schooling but that experi-
ence of schooling would also affect his or her subsequent development.
A person’s experience of school—his or her triumphs and tragedies there, his
or her loves and alienations, hopes and disappointments—are prominent
strands in the tapestry of his or her life narrative. A rich, vibrant, and
humane store of experiences regarding one’s school years goes a long way in
promoting mental health, whereas an opposite set of experiences may
continue to peal like a dire bell throughout the student’s life. In short,
psychic dysfunction can damage the student’s ‘learning ego’ (Anthony 1989:
120) to such an extent that ‘the many drive-determined aspects of learning—
for example, conflict, anxiety, defense, repetition, regression, specific and
non-specific transferences and counter-transferences, and the like’—may
undermine the teacher’s best efforts if he or she does not have at least a basic
hold on these phenomena and how they may manifest themselves in
students from infants to adults (Salzberger-Wittenberg 1983).
Hall (2002: 24) was therefore not overstating the point when he
recently claimed, in looking back over nearly a century of psychoanalytic
theorists writing on education, that one of the most significant contribu-
tions of psychoanalysis ‘has been its theories on intellectual and creative
inhibition’. This is so because psychoanalysis, ‘more than any other disci-
pline …, is well-placed to remind us that willingness and ability to learn are
shaped by influences far-removed from conscious and rational motives’
(Barford 2002a: 12).
Despite the limited and problematic responses of educationists to

psychoanalytical insights into education, psychoanalysts must continue
researching and amassing a database regarding the deeper psychic
causes of specific learning problems and the best pedagogical responses
to them
I can examine only a few of the many specific psychodynamic educational

problems that have been discussed by the psychoanalytic pedagogues over
the last eight decades. Even a glance at the last 80 years of the psychoanalytic
journal, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, reveals at least one article, and
often two or three, in each of its combined 300-plus issues that discuss a
particular learning disorder.
Oskar Pfister gave various examples of student behaviours that should
have alerted him to psychodynamic problems during his teaching years but
did not at the time. Some of them, he now thought, would have been rela-
tively obvious if he had had even rudimentary psychoanalytic knowledge: the
presence of dark and troubling themes in a student’s compositions, a student
developing tics during a certain kind of activity or discussion, ‘flat affect’ in
the presence of some teachers but not others, and so on. Even subtler prob-
lems would become obvious to the psychoanalytically educated teacher.
Imagine a boy, wrote Pfister, whose problem related not to a cognitive inabil-
ity but rather to his ability. This boy is ‘an excellent calculator who devours
figures with absolute intellectual hunger and attacks geometrical lines with
an affectionate regard. Is not this the solitary’, Pfister (1922: 19–20) asks,
who:
during recess and on the way to school, avoids all comrades; and did there not
a short time ago fall from his portfolio a leaf which he grabbed up quickly and
frightened to death, concealed as rapidly as possible; so rapidly, indeed, that
we could only catch the superscription: ‘Death, the Reliever’. Might not there
be some connection between the mathematical super-performance, the social
deficiency, and the title of the poem?
Zachry (1929) also dealt with the problem of neurotic over-performance

in students. She tells of a Jewish girl named Esther who lost herself in school
work because she was shunned by her gentile peers. In this instance, it was
not academic under-performance that was psychologically symptomatic but
over-performance, concluding for Esther in a complete nervous breakdown.

Like Pfister and Zachry before her, Klein (1975: 67, 90) reported many
cases of students whose problem was that they were ‘perfect’—a fact, she
believed, that would probably alert most psychoanalytically attuned teachers
to the possible presence of some form of concealment, compensation, or
compulsion in the child. Klein offered evidence of the young patient who
was an obsessively good student but showed virtually no emotions, or the girl
whose academic excellence arose from a neurotic mother-fixation.
More prevalent in Klein’s clinical practice, of course, was the problem of
poor classroom performance. She brought forward the case of a boy who was
reluctant to take part in any crafts-activities that involved taking something
out of a box. Klein and the boy finally discovered that this non-plussing
behaviour stemmed from the boy’s guilt regarding unconscious aggressive
fantasies of attacking his mother’s body. Inhibitions in classroom play as well
as in learning can ‘possess every degree of strength and every variety of
form’. Understanding and addressing such problems is all the more key in a
teacher’s practice because ‘[s]uch inhibitions in learning are often the basis
of later vocational inhibitions …’ (Klein 1975: 98).
Redl and Wattenberg (1951) analysed the case of a girl who had trouble
working out a puzzle containing the words ‘sick’, ‘heart’, and ‘well’ because
of her anxiety about her mother’s illness. Pearson (1954) discussed a boy
whose number phobia stemmed from his association of that number with a
traumatic event, a girl whose problems with long division were ultimately
traceable to a separation anxiety, and a boy whose refusal to take part in
sports grew out of his fear of homosexual-sadistic behaviours directed
against him by his classmates in the locker room and on the playing field.
Peller (1978) illustrated how excessive praise of a little boy’s paintings when
he was 2-years old had so stressed the child that, by the time he began school
he was unable to paint at all, despite (or rather, because of) his innate talent.
How different such unwise handling of the child is from that of which the
psychoanalytically sensitive teacher is capable; for that teacher not only is
less prone to create psychic problems but he or she is more prone to help a
student resolve them in the form of creative sublimations. Take poetry, ‘an
oral-erotic play of chewing and sucking nice words and phrases’. It is able to
embody productively the unconscious energy of students whose experiences
during the oral phase of development may have been conflicted (Pearson
554 C. MAYES
1954: 214). Or it might also be the case that a certain student’s interest in
drama positively sublimates what would otherwise manifest itself as morbid
exhibitionism (p. 216).
In the 1960s, the psychoanalytic pedagogues continued to insist on how
the psychoanalytically informed teacher can use even the most bizarre and
potentially dangerous of his or her students’ fantasies and feelings for quite
normative educational purposes. Thus, Hill (1969), in a very practical essay,
gave many concrete examples of how to enlist the student’s unconscious into
the study of subjects ranging from art to geography, civics to history, and
physical education to creative writing. Pointing out that such psychoanalytic
skills are not just icing on the cake but are indispensable in teaching the
humanities or social science, Jones (1968: 244) declared:
any lesson in the humanities or social studies which confronts children with the
truth of its subject matter—be it family life among the Eskimos, the invention
of the steam engine, the Boston Tea Party, the death of Abraham Lincoln, or
what have you—will naturally provide effective stimulation of their emotions
and fantasies.
In short:
[T]he accommodative aspect of intelligence is interfered with when what can
be learned or what one is supposed to and consciously intends to learn is asso-
ciated with a repressed fantasy, memory, or idea. On the other side of the coin,
displacements can be the cause of intense affective interests in anything which
unconsciously represents that which is repressed. Fascination, curiosity, and a
particular absorption may be manifestations of such displacements. (Schwartz
1989: 561)
Barford’s (2002b: 57) elegant phrase, ‘the imaginal domain’, captures
much of what psychoanalytic educationists have been writing about for the
last 80 years: it refers to that ‘unique domain of learning where objectives
ideas and subjective emotions are joined together’. As such, the imaginal
domain is the stage on which many classroom dramas play out, dramas that
the psychoanalytically wise teacher, like a skilled director, can help bring to
a successful denouement.
To return to the issue of high levels of school performance as potentially
problematic, it is important to acknowledge that some teachers may under-
standably find it difficult ever to see scholastic excellence as a problem. This
is perhaps especially true in the US today, as neo-conservative federal agen-
das for educational reform over the last two decades, from A Nation at Risk
(National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983) to No Child Left
Behind (US Department of Education 2002) have emphasized ‘excellence’
on standardized instruments of assessment as the only legitimate educational
goal. This makes it doubly crucial that educators attend to the warning that
psychoanalytic pedagogy has vociferously raised throughout its history: priz-
ing only academic excellence in a child not only reinforces existing neuroses
but can create them.
Some of the earliest and best statements in the psychoanalytic literature
along these lines are to be found in Melanie Klein’s writings. Speaking of what
she called a healthy ‘instinct for knowledge’, Klein (1975: 103) proclaimed
in 1932 that the fundamental educational question from a psychoanalytic
point of view is how to promote ‘a relatively undisturbed development’ of that

instinct, which will ideally turn freely ‘in a number of different directions, yet
without having that character of compulsion which is typical of an obsessional
neurosis’. About 20 years later, Redl and Wattenberg (1951) cautioned that
a certain kind of obsessional conformism, which slavishly submits to every
teacher and every rule, is not evidence of healthy social adaptation but is,
instead, a red flag signalling that the child’s behaviour, at school and at home,
is probably the result of fear—an emotion that furthers totalitarian purposes,
not the democratic ones to which the psychoanalysts have mostly subscribed
(Castoriadis 1991). Hence, according to Redl and Wattenberg (1951: 204),
‘[w]hen a boy or girl shows signs of being unusually anxious to please, we
should realize we have a delicate problem on our hands, instead of feeling
flattered’. This child, seeing himself or herself as a (school) object to be
manipulated by others, engages in learning only in order to confirm his or

her servitude, not to win a principled intellectual and moral freedom. This
confounds the whole purpose of the educational enterprise:
In a sense, each bit of good work [such students] do is a gift, or more accurately
a bribe. Their actions carry this meaning, ‘See, I’ve done what you wanted;
I’ve proved that your wish is my command. Now, reward me by taking me
under your wing. Lift me to joy by saying you like me’. (Redl and Wattenberg
1951: 203)
Teachers must be vigilant in recognizing and helping these unfortunate chil-
dren, ‘whose defensive specialty is that of excessive intellectualization’
(Jones 1968: 230), ‘the frequently defensive use of the purely intellectual act’
(Piers and Piers 1989: 202).
Such pronouncements as these reflect Kohut’s (1978a) idea that over-
intellectualization (and perfectionism in general) is often symptomatic of
a narcissistic personality disorder. It also relies upon the idea of what
Winnicott (1992a) calls the false self. Fairbairn’s (1992) assertion that
many people construct elaborate intellectual structures as a psychotic
defence mechanism against authentic engagement with life is also apposite
here. Indeed, Fairbairn’s work is particularly insistent and poignant in
calling attention to the fact that ‘overvaluation of mental contents’ is ulti-
mately a desperate attempt ‘to heap up values in the inner world’ to the
exclusion of external reality, and therefore is symptomatic of an unhealthy
‘libidinizing’ of thoughts and theories, typically concluding in some form
of ‘fanaticism’ (pp. 15–20). And what is true for students in the schools is
even truer for scholars in the university, where ‘“intensive inquiry” may in
fact be pathological, and may lead us to consider carefully the degree of
psychopathology incorporated in all research or intellectual work’ (Hall
2002: 39).
Teachers must be aware of the proper uses and the potential misuses of
transferential and counter-transferential dynamics in the classroom
The psychoanalytic pedagogues have made much of transferential dynamics

in terms of the student–teacher relationship, even claiming that a transferential
556 C. MAYES
understanding of that relationship was the most important insight that psycho-
analysis had to offer education (Pearson 1954).8 Indeed, some of Freud’s
earliest work dealt with the tendency of the child to transfer a host of issues
onto the teacher.
Transference
The best early statements regarding the transference in education came from
Aichhorn (1951), who advised teachers that when a student’s response is
puzzling because of its inappropriateness, it may be that the student is trans-
ferring a parental issue onto the teacher. ‘In such cases, what you see being
enacted before your eyes are really only repetitions and new editions of very
old conflicts of which you are the target but not the cause’ (Freud 1974: 88).
This is so because ‘there is in the individual a compulsion to repeat in later
life the pattern of his earlier love and hate, rebellion and submission, disloy-
alty and loyalty’ (Freud 1974: 109)—a compulsion that the student almost
instinctively aims at the teacher. This need not be a bad thing if the teacher
is psychoanalytically sensitive, because the teacher, who in some senses is a
‘safer’ person than a parent, ‘may be in a better position than the parent to
help the adolescent deal with new emotions, and may receive the transferred
feelings of the student as a parental figure’ (Blos 1941: 494). This makes
sense, particularly in light of the fact that, next to the parent, the teacher is
the most likely target of the student’s projections regarding his or her earliest
caregivers (Redl and Wattenberg 1951: 235), and this is why it is so crucial
for the teacher to understand the transference (Pearson 1954).
Grossman (1975), noting the increasingly close connection between
homes and schools, predicted that this would heighten the propensity of the
child to transfer family-of-origin issues onto schools and teachers. He even
thought that, in the later grades, the psychotherapeutically sensitive teacher
might be able in some instances to help the student understand his or her
classroom transferences so that that student could gain insight into the
deeper issues involved:
The goal is first to help the child identify the feelings expressed in his attitude
toward the teacher and then to help him assess the degree to which these feel-
ings are appropriate to their relationship and how they affect it. (Grossman
1975: 65)
One or two lone dissenting voices warned that although it was important for
teachers to understand the transference, it was not wise for them to try to
work with it in the classroom because they did not have adequate training
to do so (Fox 1975). Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority opinion
among the psychoanalytic pedagogues was that ‘if there is little transference,
then little will be emotionally meaningful in the classroom and little can
generalize to the outside. It is important to note that once the transference
is recognized, the teacher has the most powerful tool ever discovered to
influence the lives of the students’—an influence that virtually all of the
psychoanalytic pedagogues hoped would further psychosocially normative
goals (Kirman 1977: 49).
In the following decade, Salzberger-Wittenberg (1983), in another land-
mark study in psychoanalytic pedagogy, The Emotional Experience of Learning
and Teaching, acknowledged the professional and situational constraints on

how and when the teacher can cultivate the transference but nevertheless
argued for the appropriateness of doing so if the teacher is psychoanalytically
adroit. The teacher is not a therapist who needs intimate knowledge about
the student. However, it is only commonsense to recognize that teaching
may have a healthily therapeutic dimension:
[W]e do not need to unravel a person’s past history in order to understand
him. If we are observant, we can gain insight into his assumptions and beliefs
from his behaviour and reactions to ourselves and others in the here and now.
Awareness of the transference elements enables us to have some space to think
about the nature of the relationship, to take a more objective view of it.
(Salzberger-Wittenberg 1983: 36)
Cozzarrelli and Silin (1989), drawing on the work of Kohut, asserted

that it is vital that the teacher understand the transference because he or she
will inevitably receive the ‘idealizing’ and ‘mirroring’ projections of the
student. The teacher can use such transferences in order to model behaviour
that will make him or her a good ‘ego ideal’ for the student. According to
Kohut (1978a), the foundations of a person’s sense of self reside in his or
her earliest relationships with primary caregivers—or ‘selfobjects’, so called
because they are the objects of the infant’s earliest attention and affection
through whom the infant learns about the world and, principally, itself.
Typically, the infant’s central selfobject is its mother. The infant’s psyche is
so dramatically shaped by its interaction with its mother because it is symbi-
otically fused with her at this primal stage. Indeed, in the infant’s earliest
view, the mother is indistinguishable from itself, according to many psycho-
analytic theorists (although this assumption has come under fire recently).
If the mother’s interaction with the infant communicates love and accep-
tance, the infant begins to assume that it is loveable and accepted, and that
the world is essentially dependable and beneficent. The infant comes to see
itself as essentially a good, stable, and integral being. In short, the child’s
‘primary narcissism’ (Kohut 1978b: 430) finds confirmation and gratifica-
tion in its union with the loving mother—the first and most important
selfobject for the infant. Later, the teacher may serve the same mirroring and
idealizing functions.
Cozzarrelli and Silin (1989) have warned that the teacher who does not
understand mirroring and idealizing transferences may unconsciously
misuse transferential energy in order to inappropriately satisfy his or her own
ego at the expense of the student’s legitimate need to define himself or
herself by finding and emulating an ideal selfobject. There is simply no side-
stepping the fact that the teacher will always be some kind of selfobject for a
student: ‘teaching … is at least in part a selfobject function’ in which the
student forms many of his own ideals and comes to appreciate his own poten-
tial to accomplish those ideals in the process of his mirroring and idealizing
transferences onto the teacher (Wolf 1989: 381).
Some educationists have combined Kohutian theory with the that of
D. W. Winnicott to picture the classroom as serving not only mirroring and
idealizing needs of the child but also as providing a ‘holding environment’
where the teacher can provide a safe space for the child to grow, just as the
558 C. MAYES
mother does for the developing infant. ‘Since our earliest learning arises in
the intimate relationship of parent and child, each new course reawakens in
students the need to have a target of idealization and to have their efforts
admired’ (Elson 1989: 789).
Whether the course is biology, mathematics, sociology, or child care, the
teacher provides a holding environment. … This holding environment is one
in which the empathic understanding of the teacher creates the conditions
which allow the student to reveal what he does not know. Seeing the student
at his least effectual, and yet nor breaking off contact or shaming him because
of his limitations, becomes in itself a novel, healing experience for the student.
(Elson 1989: 801)
Much like Kohut, Winnicott saw the roots of psychic health or illness in
the infant’s relationship with its mother. Ideally, the mother offers a good
‘holding environment’ for the infant. This may actually involve the physical
act of lovingly holding the infant. Yet, even when it does not, it does entail
the mother providing the child with a physical and emotional context that is
appropriate to its needs and beneficial to its growth—an environment, in
short, that holds the child:
A wide extension of ‘holding’ allows this one term to describe all that a mother
does in the physical care of her baby, even including putting the baby down
when a moment has come for the impersonal experience of being held by suitable
non-human materials. In giving consideration to these matters, it is necessary
to postulate a state of the mother who is (temporarily) identified with her baby
so that she knows without thinking about it more or less what the baby needs.
She does this, in health, without losing her own identity. (Winnicott 1992b: 259)
In Winnicott’s view, it is not the perfect mother (whatever that might be)
but the good-enough mother (as he calls her) who is best able to create a realistic
and therefore viable holding-environment for the child. Winnicott devised
the phrase ‘good-enough mothering’ to distinguish it from the so-called ideal
of perfect mothering in which the mother must always be available to the
infant, meeting its every need almost before it arises. Such a ‘perfect’ mother
would have to forego her own identity, needs, and boundaries, and thus could
not relate healthily to her infant. Such a mother would also not allow the
infant to experience the tension and opposition that is necessary for it to
confront—in healthy and monitored doses, of course—so that it can become
realistically mature. ‘Good-enough mothering gives opportunity for the
steady development of personal processes in the baby’ (Winnicott 1992c:
456)—processes that will feed positively upon the mother’s realistic humanity
and not her neurotic perfectionism. Wool (1989: 750) has devised the notion
of ‘the good-enough teacher’ who can help the student define an educational
holding environment where he or she can experiment in ways that offer both
safety and a limited degree of risk without the teacher burning out because
of the unrealistic need to be a perfect teacher.
Counter-transference
Just as the analyst who is not aware of his or her own unresolved psychic
problems can project them onto the patient and harm him or her, so the
teacher can damagingly project his or her issues onto the unsuspecting
student. Such things would be much less common and lethal, the psychoan-
alytic pedagogues have promised, if the teacher, understanding his or her
counter-transferences, learned either not to counter-transfer, or to do so in a
way that was ethically and pedagogically sane. Such psychoanalytic knowl-
edge would help the teacher understand how and why he or she responds to
students, especially certain students, as he or she does, which could only
result in him or her responding to them better.
Teachers, more than the members of any other professional groups except
psychoanalysts, are exposed to the instinctual temptations arising from the
unconscious of those with whom their work is concerned, in this instance their
pupils. Children are freer than adults in their direct expressions of hatred,
envy, destructiveness, jealousy—particularly sibling rivalry—ridicule, cruelty,
anger, uncleanliness, sexual curiosity, exhibitionism, oral eroticism, masoch-
ism, and the rest, and this relative freedom offers a great unconscious tempta-
tion to the teacher to do likewise. (Pearson 1954: 256)
Redl and Wattenberg (1951) offered some rules-of-thumb for teachers
to help them avoid dystonic counter-transferences and cultivate syntonic
ones. For instance, a male teacher who might negatively project his desire to
‘save’ female students because of psychological enmeshment with his
mother (a negative counter-transference) could learn to tame and produc-
tively use his ‘saviour’ counter-transferences so as to be of greatest service to
his students without becoming psychologically enmeshed with them (a posi-
tive counter-transference) (Mayes 2005). It behooves teachers, therefore, to
develop self-awareness, seek satisfactions outside of the classroom, evaluate
possible dissatisfactions in their personal and professional lives and then seek
help on specific questions, talk things over with friends individually and in
groups, develop new avocations and recognize new possibilities in teaching
so as not to try to get psychic gratification inappropriately from students
(Redl and Wattenberg 1951).
So adamant have the psychoanalytic pedagogues been about the need for
the teacher to master his or her counter-transferences that in the literature
during the 1920s through the 1950s, there were many serious calls for the
teacher to undergo analysis during the student-teaching years, just as an
analyst-in-training must do. The last serious call along these lines came from
Jersild, Lazar, and Brodkin (1962) in their study of hundreds of teachers
who, having undergone therapy, reported its generally quite positive effects
on their teaching.9 Furthermore, because the student’s issues will frequently
revive similar issues that are unresolved in the teacher from when he or she
was the student’s age, ‘the teacher must understand two children: the child
he confronts in the classroom and the vestigial child within himself’ (Fox
1975: 164).
Although not a therapist, the therapeutically knowledgeable teacher can

fulfil various legitimate therapeutic functions in the classroom
But how, after all, can teacher fulfil a therapeutic function without falling into
the dangerous illusion that he or she is a therapist? Various psychoanalysts
have approached this delicate issue from many angles.
560 C. MAYES
Pfister (1922) pointed out that because teaching and learning are inevi-
tably emotional processes, knowledge of emotional dynamics is an essential
arrow in the teacher’s professional quiver. Kilpatrick (1925), the well-
known Progressive theorist and practitioner, said teachers should under-
stand psychoanalysis simply to be of maximum help to students in their
emotional growth. Blos (1941: 505) recommended that psychoanalytic
knowledge should be a part of teacher education curricula in order to help
teachers understand their students’ general developmental issues and at
least some of their present behaviours that might otherwise threaten,
seduce, or confuse the teacher. In gaining and using this knowledge, the
teacher is by no means performing some sort of medical function (Redl and
Wattenberg 1951); however, it is part of the teacher’s duty to help ‘relieve
the child of some emotional pressure. At the minimum, it may keep him
from getting worse. On the positive side, it may increase the probability of
success in treatment being undertaken by outside agencies’ (Redl and
Wattenberg 1951: 347)—a point that is even more apposite today than
when it was made in 1951, owing to the much larger number of young
people currently in therapy.
Reflecting the liberatory pedagogical aims of many educationists in the
1960s, a constant theme of that decade was that ‘the next goal of education
is nothing less than the progressive freeing of man’, the teacher could best
reach this political goal ‘through psychoanalytically rich education’ (Kubie
1967: 70). The teacher must know ‘how to cultivate and deploy aroused
imaginations, and their attendant emotions’ in order to help free the child
both intellectually and politically—but to do so as a teacher, not a therapist
(Jones 1968: 85). Two decades later, the psychoanalytic literature is still full
of claims that there is inevitably a therapeutic component of the teacher’s
role—if, indeed, the teacher wishes to consider and shape the total character
of the student.
So, like it or not, the teacher, if he or she is to be successful, must function as
a psychotherapist, not in the formal sense of conducting therapy sessions with
the students, but in the practical sense of being alert and responsive to the
psychological needs that students evince both by what they do and what they
do not do. (Basch 1989: 772)
Many psychoanalytic writers have made the compelling point that it is
precisely the psychoanalytically knowledgeable teacher who will know his or
her limits and thus be less, not more, likely to try to perform functions that
should belong to the therapist alone. Discussing a programme at the
Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis which provided teachers with psycho-
analytic knowledge relevant to teaching, Field (1989b: 944), a director of the
programme, made it clear that it did not endeavour to:
[turn] teaching into therapy nor [did] the faculty [conceive] its function as
therapists rather than teachers. On the contrary, this dawning recognition of
the commonalities in the two functions [of teaching and therapy] has furthered
our understanding of the differentials and, at the same time, helped promote
more integration of cognitive and affective modes in learning and teaching.
Elson (1989: 805), another analyst participating in the Chicago Institute
Programme, stressed that:
[o]ur purpose was not to make therapists of teachers. Rather we worked

together toward understanding the barriers to learning, the unexpected hostil-
ity, so difficult to withstand, by which students covered over the shame of not
knowing and the fear of failure.
In sum, most psychoanalysts who have written about education and the
quasi-therapeutic role of the teacher would probably agree with the distinc-
tion that has recently been drawn between a ‘mastery conception’ of teach-
ing and a ‘therapeutic conception’ of teaching:
According to the mastery conception, someone who continues to hold

conflicting beliefs, even after it has been ‘brought out’ to her attention, is
considered peculiar. This is not the case with the teacher-therapist: she is
inclined to read the situation from a perspective that recognizes that there are
cases of ambivalence that actually reflect a state of internal conflict. In these

cases, being caught midway is seen as a condition in which the learner signals
that she is undergoing a process of change. … Unlike the teacher-master, the
teacher-therapist interprets the dissonance as a symptom of a dilemma and
often as an indication that the learner is in the process of confronting herself.
(Shalem and Bensusan 1999: 30)
Psychoanalysis and education: problems and potentials
In this paper I have examined some of the major themes that have emerged
over 80 years of psychoanalytic research into education. Later psychoanalysts
such as Kohut, Winnicott, and Fairbairn ultimately focused upon the defi-
nition and maintenance of a cohesive self as the primary psychic imperative
(Eagle 1993). Although admitting the importance of sexuality in the individ-
ual’s psychic functioning, both classical and neo-Freudian analysts interested
in education have tended (like many of the progressive educationists of the
20th century) to define the primary educational imperative as the develop-
ment of an integrated and balanced self in fruitful psychosocial encounters
with others in existentially authentic school settings. Furthermore, they have
almost universally insisted upon the educationist’s responsibility to socialize
the child along fairly normative lines. Surprisingly, this was even true in the
radical 1960s.
More recent theorists also added a variety of new terms to the psychoan-
alytic lexicon that have proven central to the idea of teaching and learning in
a psychoanalytic mode: selfobjects and the mirroring and idealizing trans-
ferences (Kohut); holding environments and good-enough mothering
(Winnicott); and hyper-intellectualism as a psychotic defense mechanism
(Fairbairn).
Two of the great themes running throughout the writings of the psycho-
analytic pedagogues are, on one hand, the enormous potential of psycho-
analysis to humanize education and, on the other hand, its general failure to
penetrate the official structure of public schooling. The psychoanalytic
pedagogues have attributed this failure to everything from unconscious resis-
tance on the part of teachers and policy-makers to the depersonalizing
educational agendas of capitalism.
562 C. MAYES
Not surprisingly, psychoanalytic pedagogy has been highly critical of the

depersonalizing consequences of behaviourist pedagogy. Although taking a
more amiable view of Piagetian constructivism, the psychoanalytic peda-
gogues have been critical here too, insisting that learning is more than just
cognitive accommodation and assimilation but involves the student’s and
teacher’s deepest hopes and fears, loves and hates, all of which make up ‘the
subjective curriculum’. They have pointed out that profound and lasting
cognitive transformations can occur in the student only if those transforma-
tions are psychodynamically viable.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, the emphasis in psychoanalytic literature
was on problematic school experiences. The 1960s saw a growing focus on the
positive, liberatory potentials of psychoanalytic pedagogy, but in the 1970s
the pendulum swung back toward the pole of educational problems. From
the 1980s until currently, there seem to have been more of a felicitous
balance between educational problems and potentials in the psychoanalytic
literature than at any other time in the last 80 years. In this paper, I have
examined in some detail a representative range of some of the educational
problems that psychoanalysis can address and the potentials it can cultivate.
Of all of the educational issues with which the psychoanalytic writers
have dealt, the idea of transferential dynamics in teacher–student relation-
ships is perhaps the single most important one. The psychoanalytic peda-
gogues have vociferously claimed that the teacher, although not a therapist,
can, if armed with a basic knowledge of the fundamental principles and
practices of psychoanalysis in general and transference in particular, teach
in ways that are psychologically wise and sometimes even therapeutically
efficacious.
This panorama of psychoanalytic approaches to education over the last
80 years, I trust, will help renew interest in what psychoanalysis, in both its
classic and current forms, has to say to educational policy-makers, princi-
pals, teachers, and teacher educators as they go about the crucially impor-
tant task of fostering the psychological, social, and moral growth of teachers
and students in the schools.
Notes
1. See Clifford and Guthrie (1988), Popkewitz (1987), and Valli (1993).
2. As with so much else in Freudian psychology, however, it is well to remember that
Freud’s ideas stem from historical roots and did not simply appear out of nowhere. The
early Mesmerists, Magnetists, and other proto-psychiatrists, for instance, had noted the
potentially dangerous phenomenon of the patient’s growing attraction (often of a sexual
nature) to the clinician as well as the patient’s identification of the clinician with someone
from the past (Ellenberger 1970).
3. Not many Freudians shared then, however, and not all share even now, this positive
view of the possibilities of the counter-transference. For example, Winnicott (1988:
266) has tersely restated the classical Freudian position that ‘the meaning of the word
counter-transference can only be the [analyst’s] neurotic features that spoil the profes-
sional attitude and disturb the course of the analytic process as determined by the
patient’. This, however, is rapidly becoming the minority view in the neo-Freudian
literature on the counter-transference. Winnicott’s disinclination to consider counter-
transference a valid part of the therapeutic process may be due to the fact that his work
was primarily with children, who, because they are particularly vulnerable, certainly
have a special need to be protected against harmful counter-transferences from the

analyst.
4. Despite Hall’s apparent approval of ‘Freudism’, as he called it, there are different
views on how much Hall really ‘bought into’ the Freudian view. Hall’s biographer,
Ross (1972), suggests that Hall embraced many of Freud’s ideas with great enthusi-
asm. On the other hand, Fuller (1986), a historian of the development of psychology
in the US, believes that Hall’s enthusiasm for Freud was mainly political and
cosmetic and did not really stem from Hall’s core convictions as either a psychologist
or educationist.
5. Many authorities quoted in this paper used versions of the so-called ‘generic he’, follow-
ing the custom of their times. Their own wording in relevant quotes has been retained.
6. Piagetian psychology does examine psychological structures that underlie consciousness
and thus bears some resemblance to depth psychological systems (Field et al. 1989).
However, in its almost exclusively cognitive emphasis, it does not pay enough attention
to emotional dynamics to qualify as a depth psychology (Homans 1989).
7. The fact that Freud focused on the neuroses and Jung on the psychoses helps to explain
the very different models of the psyche that each one ultimately formulated. Freud
focused on those facts and factors of ego development that engender neurosis while Jung
looked at the pre-egoic and trans-egoic factors that underlie the psychoses. These two
different foci—which have recently been coming increasingly together in the work of
certain neo-Freudian and neo-Jungian theorists and clinicians—undoubtedly played a
role in the unfortunate break between the two men in 1913 (Mayes 2005).
8. See also Mayes (2002, 2004a, b, 2005).
9. It is not entirely clear why the call from psychoanalysts for teachers to undergo analysis
seems to have ended in the early 1960s. It may relate to Americans’ increasing disen-
chantment with psychoanalysis in general throughout the second half of the 20th century
(Hillman and Ventura 1993) and their disinclination to have it imposed on teachers in
such a personal way. This topic requires further study.
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Victoria]

On: 19 November 2014, At: 09:29

Journal of Curriculum Studies

The psychoanalytic view of teaching

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220270802056674

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The psychoanalytic view of teaching and learning,

Keywords: learning; object relations; pedagogy; psychoanalysis; teaching;

Although there is a small but lively conversation among curricular theorists

Clifford Mayes is a professor of education in the Department of Educational Leadership and

Melanie Klein (1882–1960), and other classical psychoanalysts in the

Classical psychoanalysis and education

The transference and the counter-transference

An essential element of the therapeutic process is the transference. Greenson

The roots of psychoanalysis

It would be a mistake to conclude that Freud somehow spun his model of

Psychoanalysis in the schools: great expectations, meagre results

form of new practices in classrooms across the US at all levels of instruction.

US, there was at most only an ‘indirect influence of psychoanalysis on

in the schools’ reluctance to embrace psychoanalysis an ‘unconscious resis-

On-going psychoanalytic themes regarding the

Together, both Piagetian cognitive constructivism and Vygotskyan social

Go beyond a merely cognitive approach in order to understand the

Perhaps the most persistent general theme in psychoanalytic pedagogy has

in things educational. We are consulted on many difficult educational points.

1956)—was shown by the psychoanalytic pedagogues, as instructionally

not exclude a psychoanalytic approach. Ekstein (1969b) suggested that

The subjective curriculum may also include the teacher’s experiences:

Teachers must always consider the possibility that a student’s seemingly

Although it is undoubtedly true that ‘psychoanalytic inquiry regarding

having been psycho-sexually enmeshed with his mother in an Oedipal situa-

Despite the limited and problematic responses of educationists to

I can examine only a few of the many specific psychodynamic educational

Zachry (1929) also dealt with the problem of neurotic over-performance

over-performance, concluding for Esther in a complete nervous breakdown.

point of view is how to promote ‘a relatively undisturbed development’ of that

manipulated by others, engages in learning only in order to confirm his or

The psychoanalytic pedagogues have made much of transferential dynamics

and Teaching, acknowledged the professional and situational constraints on

Cozzarrelli and Silin (1989), drawing on the work of Kohut, asserted

Although not a therapist, the therapeutically knowledgeable teacher can

[o]ur purpose was not to make therapists of teachers. Rather we worked

According to the mastery conception, someone who continues to hold

cases of ambivalence that actually reflect a state of internal conflict. In these

Psychoanalysis and education: problems and potentials

Not surprisingly, psychoanalytic pedagogy has been highly critical of the

have a special need to be protected against harmful counter-transferences from the

Clifford, G. J. and Guthrie, J. W. (1988) Ed School: A Brief for Professional Education

Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Madison, CT: International Universities Press), 267–303.

National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983) A Nation at Risk: The Imperative

E. R. Hilgard (New York: Harcourt, Brace).

Explorations, ed. C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd and M. Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

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