21. Education and Psychoanalysis
Paper
Between Jouissance and Desire, Knowledge and Truth. Work with a Student who Suffers from "School Phobia"
Jean-Marie Weber
University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Presenting Author: Weber, Jean-Marie
This paper deals with the problem of the so-called "school phobia" and school failure. Based on my research so far, I have been able to show that the desire for knowledge of school dropouts is often blocked by psychological challenges, existential questions and anxiety. In this paper I would like to illustrate this with a clinical case of phobia.
It is about a young university student from France who decided to work through his suffering. I have been accompanying him for about two years at the rate of one session per week.
The student complains of numerous situations of social phobia, bullying, exam anxiety, fears during train or car rides, or fear of speaking in front of others in class.
His school phobia begins in kindergarten. The separation from his mother is very difficult. Especially since the teacher grumbles a lot with him, he is afraid of being penetrated by the teacher's gaze and words.
In the first school year he playfully enjoys doing the math work in advance. The teacher, however, insinuates that he has copied from his schoolmate and calls him a "freeloader". The student reacts to this misunderstanding and disregard with "laziness, doing nothing"at school : "je m'en fou". He adheres less and less to limits and rules. He is diagnosed as hyperactive and is prescribed Ritalin. In some subjects, however, he shows his excellent knowledge. Several teachers predict that he will get nowhere.
He is teased, tracked down in his hiding places, chased around the schoolyard and is even seriously injured once. He does not succeed in his school career the way he wants; whether it is through poor grades in math or obscure institutional rules.
Nevertheless, he retains the desire to learn what he likes. In some subjects, he aims for perfection. Despite completing an apprenticeship, he is unable to find a job, probably because of his shyness. After a two-year absence, he returns to school and manages to get a certificate for university entrance.
I will show how the analytical process has worked so far. Working through signifiers, situations of fear and dreams, the occupation of " finding a secured place for himself" shows up. His phobic phantasm is characterized by mistrust. Because of the "gaze" and the course introduction of some professors he is "already sure" that he will not pass the exam. Here it becomes apparent that the imaginary has the upper hand and is not sufficiently dialectized with the real.
Similar to "little Hans", the student is concerned with a "more" of enjoyment. (Freud, 1909) However, when the analysand encounters someone who seems too intrusive, panic attacks occur. They are not an expression of castration anxiety ( Lacan 1994), but precisely of the lack of separation by a third party and thus of the fragile symbolic network. When the mediation of the symbolic law of impossibility works, a transformation from enjoyment to desire occurs and the protagonist can better manage the panic moments.
Meanwhile, the analysand can develop strategies to prepare for exams in a more organized way and be less driven by anxiety. He can set limits to his rampant drive for knowledge. Education occurs through a loss of enjoyment, writes Lacan (2001, 364). In parallel, the analysand presents numerous dreams, thanks to which he cautiously - without losing too much control - approaches the truth of his own desire. In this way, he makes contact with his own strangeness, the real and thus also with his split as a subject. Only the future will show whether he can also drop his gaze as an object (little) a.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe paper is based on a still ongoing psychoanalytic cure. According to the basic Freudian rule, I listen to the analysand with free-floating attention so that the otherness of the Other finds its place. My questioning, interpretating and scanding have the goal to open the analysand to his unconscious knowledge.
The verbatim are written down after each session and reflected on them between sessions. They are regularly discussed in the control analysis. This helps to question myself, to reflect on my narcissistic security and depressiveness regarding my knowledge. It is also a matter of analyzing the moments when I am deaf as analyst and of discussing questions about the psychic structure and of recognizing aspects of transference as well as analyzing my own counter-transference. In the transference of the student, it became apparent that his fear of encountering the external "stranger" was related to his fear of the "internal alterity," the Other as the treasure of the unconscious.
Working on this analytical process, I am interested in the evolution of the students’ position regarding his complaint and the responsibility he sees in using his symptom.
It is also about uncovering the basic phantasm and, if possible, crossing it, i.e., dropping the object (little) a. For this I support the associating by interpreting and analyzing the linking of the signifiers to chains of signifiers.
The analysis demands from the analysand to deconstruct as far as possible his imaginary ego and to leave the field to the unconscious knowledge. As a subject he should be able to live his singular way more freely and to organize his studies more free of fear. I therefore support him to assume the split between the imaginary and the real in order to trace his singular desire.
The accompaniment is arranged in such a way that the analysand first assumes knowledge to the analyst as imagined subject. Then the analyst as Other is to help that the symptom can be verbalized as a message and opened to ambiguity, and finally he must help the analysand to see the recognition of dependence on the object (little) a. Insofar as the analyst figures the object a, I am particularly attentive to how the analysand relates to me.
All this is considered as a prerequisite for him to respect the law of the impossible and thus to form himself by also being able to limit the jouissance. (Lacan,2001, 364)
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsSome life experiences are so destabilizing that eventually they led young people to resume school. School phobia or dropping out of school is an addressed symptom. It's a means of situating oneself as subject. (Weber, Voyonva, 2021) It is a subjective construction regarding the question of the desire of the Other and a response to the lack of a definitive answer. As in the clinical case described, some have no confidence in life and think they must fight for everything themselves or must steal it from life. They are afraid that someone will see through this. If someone takes a gaze at this subjective attitude, they get scared and can react quite aggressively and close themselves off to the gaze of the other person. Often trapped in their ideas of a certain self-will without allowing alterity, they hardly face their unconscious knowledge nor speaking. As in the clinical case described, it takes a long analytical work to arrive as a split subject, to accept the "lack of being", the otherness, to detach oneself from the disregard and the lies of another, from the "gaze" as object little a.
A clinical work like this is an example for me in teacher education. It seems important to me that teachers recognize the relation to learning has to do fundamentally with the unconscious relation of the respective subject, to the Other as well as to the contingency of life. Of course, it is also about showing how intrusive and destructive the power of the teacher can be and how he or she has to deal with students as subjects.
This is an ethical challenge that is itself related to the unconscious desire of the teacher.
ReferencesBlanchard-Laville, C. Au risque d'enseigner. Paris, Puf
Douville, O. (s. direct.) (2006). Les méthodes cliniques en psychologie, Paris, Dunod
Fink, B. (2007). Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique. A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners, W.W. Norton & Company, New-York, London
Freud, S. (1909). Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben. GW. VII, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, p. 241- 377
Imbert, F. (1997). Vivre ensemble, un enjeu pour l'école. Paris, ESF
Lacan, J. (1994). Le Séminaire, Livre IV, La relation d'objet, Paris, Seuil
Lacan, J. (2004). Le Séminaire, Livre X, L'angoisse, Paris, Seuil
Lacan, J. Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil
Menès, Martine (2012). L'enfant et le savoir. D'où vient le désir d'apprendre, Paris, Seuil
Nougué, Y. (2003). L'entretien clinique. Paris, Anthropos
Weber, J.-M. & Voynova, R. (2021). Le décrochage scolaire, le rapport au savoir et la pulsion de mort. Nîmes: Champ social.
21. Education and Psychoanalysis
Paper
How To Deal With the Other in a Co-teaching Situation : a Clinical Approach
Marc Guignard
université lyon 2, France
Presenting Author: Guignard, Marc
This paper is based on a research conducted in France in isolated rural elementary school in the Ardèche department where a co-teaching arrangement has been set up. In these one-classroom schools, two teachers are thus brought to teach in the same class during a school year. Co-teaching is defined by Tremblay (2012) as "joint pedagogical work, in the same group and at the same time, by two or more teachers sharing educational responsibilities to achieve specific objectives. ». Situations where co-teaching occurs have been studied in other research (Tremblay and Toullec-Therry, 2020), particularly from a didactic perspective (Prevel and Buznic-Bourgeac, 2020) or in connection with inclusive education (Tremblay, 2011).
After presenting the context of the research, this paper proposes to grasp, in a psychoanalytically oriented clinical approach (Blanchard-Laville et al., 2005), some of the psychic issues wich may be specific to co-teaching situations. In such a situation, each teacher is required to teach in the presence of another. This other is sufficiently close (he or she is also a teacher) but also sufficiently distant in terms of his or her teaching style, background and pedagogical references. In some situations, this other, constituted by the second teacher, could be the mirror of an otherness present in oneself, and a vector of the « uncanny » (Freud, 1919). Consequently, teaching "under the gaze of another" can constitute a test for the teacher that leads to certain psychological reorganizations, for example, defensiveness.
Moreover, teaching in the presence of another person is a situation that can call into question the links that the teacher forges with his or her students, but also the way in which he or she updates his or her own relationship to knowledge during the teaching sequence. These two dimensions of the link to the pupil and the link to the knowledge taught shape the psychic space of the classroom and constitute what Claudine Blanchard-Laville calls the teacher's didactic transfer (Blanchard-Laville, 1997). Thus, is it possible to extend the notion of didactic transfer, initially thought by its author in "classic" teaching situations, to situations where two teachers teach together? What modalities of didactic transfer of each teacher find expression within the class which constitutes a single psychic space?
Furthermore, I have proposed the notion of internal psychic parenthood (Guignard, 2017) to try to capture a modality of how didactic transfer unfolds in the classroom. In a co-teaching situation, in the ordeal that teaching with another can constitute, how is this internal psychic parentality reorganized? being two teachers could thus strongly refer each of them to psychic arrangements specific to the couple and to parenthood. In such a situation, wouldn't the paternal and maternal functions that are articulated during a lesson tend to be split up and taken in charge separately by each of the two teachers?
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThis paper will link some vignettes from the research with theoretical contributions from the field of psychoanalysis.
The methodology used for this research is based on two types of material. On the one hand, observations were carried out in the classes where co-teaching was implemented. On the other hand, interviews were conducted with the two teachers participating in the co-teaching scheme. Out of a corpus of 24 interviews, 3 were conducted by the author of this paper and can be considered as clinical research interviews (Yelnik, 2005). It is these interviews, coupled with observations conducted in the teachers' classrooms, that constitute the bulk of the material used in this paper. However, the other interviews were taken up in the preparation of this paper.
The vignettes presented will therefore be based on this research material.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe co-teaching situation leads to question the notion of didactic transfer initially forged in a teaching situation where the teacher is alone in front of his class. It also activates psychic processes, some of which may be linked to the professional part of the internal psychic parenthood of education professionals.
ReferencesBlanchard-Laville, C. (1997). L’enseignant et la transmission dans l’espace psychique de la classe. Recherches En Didactique Des Mathématiques, 17(3), 151–176.
Blanchard-Laville Claudine, Chaussecourte Philippe, Hatchuel Françoise, Pechberty Bernard. (2005). Recherches cliniques d’orientation psychanalytique dans le champ de l’éducation et de la formation. Revue française de pédagogie, 151, 111-162.
Freud, S. (1919). L’inquiétante étrangeté. Essais de psychanalyse appliquée. Gallimard, 1976.
Guignard, M. (2017). Vers une prise en compte d’une part professionnelle de la bisexualité psychique dans l’étude des modalités du transfert didactique de l’enseignant. Cliopsy, 18, 9-22.
Prevel, S. et Buznic-Bourgeacq, P. (2020). Des rôles didactiques pour les sujets du coenseignement. Ajustements et variations identitaires d'une enseignante surnuméraire au sein de trois binômes. Éducation et francophonie, XLVIII (2), 139-159.
Tremblay, P. (2011). Co-formation entre professionnels collaborant dans deux dispositifs d’intervention auprès d’élèves ayant des troubles d’apprentissage. Nouvelle revue de l’Adaptation scolaire. 55 (3), 175-190.
Tremblay, T et Toullec-Théry, M. (2020). Le coenseignement : théories, recherches et pratiques. INSHEA.
Yelnik C. (2005). L’entretien clinique de recherche en sciences de l’éducation. Recherche & Formation, 50, 133-146.
21. Education and Psychoanalysis
Paper
The Didactic Triangle from Sign-Theoretical Perspectives to Deepen the Pedagogical Situation
Christian Wiesner, Kerstin A. Zechner, Simone Breit
University College of Teacher Education, Austria
Presenting Author: Wiesner, Christian;
Zechner, Kerstin A.
An essential form for understanding world-building through teaching is the figure of thought of the so-called "didactic triangle" (the learning triangle) by Heimann (1947), which is based on Herbart's "educational theory" ("Erziehungslehre"; 1814). According to Heimann (1947), the didactic triangle creates the pedagogical situation, which is shaped in particular by the "interpersonal encounter". This phenomenon can be described as a "primal phenomenon" as well as a phenomenon of interaction and communication and whereby learning is fundamentally based on the "interpersonal relationship". Herbart's (1814) approach, however, is theoretically more profound and also highly relevant to practice: "I require of the educator above all that he orients himself most carefully in this distinction, and practise relating all teaching and learning to it. Whoever does not do this may be an excellent empiricist, but in my eyes he is not a theoretician".
The objective of this presentation is therefore to theoretically ground the didactic triangle through different theories of sign theory in order to be able to point out new insights that result from the triadic structure. This presentation therefore attempts to open up broad range of theoretical perspectives, hence the paper combines the didactic triangle in particular with the sign theory of Bühler (1918, 1926, 1934), Cassirer (1923, 1925, 1929) and Peirce (1873, 1903, 1988) in order to open up new, different insights into pedagogy, and in particular to look at the relevance of relationship and attachment (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980).
Different emphases and colourings of learning and being-in-relationship can thus be shown, enabling a broad spectrum and diversity of practices. The didactic triangle experiences a new depth of diversity through the phenomenological foundation. This variety of possibilities of learning can be connected with theories and models of communication and interaction (Wiesner, 2023b), with attachment theory (Gebauer & Wiesner, 2022; Wiesner & Gebauer, 2022, 2023) also with traditional learning theories, based on different forms of sign theory.
The research questions are based on what the didactic triangle provides and brings to pedagogy, but also how this triadic structure changes by incorporating new, different foundations and how the pedagogical relevance can thus be increased and deepened. At the same time, many connections with psychoanalytic, integrative and psychodynamic pedagogy and psychotherapy can be shown (Wiesner, 2023a). This also creates links to the concepts of being a guiding role model, being a directive role model or being an ideal role model (Bittner, 1964).
The theoretical framework thus draws on the theoretical differentiation of the didactic triangle by Herbart (1814), Heimann (1947), Gruschka (2002), Zierer (2022) and substantiates the triadic structures structurally-phenomenologically through various sign-theoretical foundations by Bühler, Cassirer and Peirce. The Vienna School of Gestalt Perception by Bühler (1912, 1926, 1934), Brunswik (1929, 1934, 1947) and Popper (1928) is also an important source for making the results and findings clearly visible in the sense of Arnheim's visual thinking (1969).
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe presentation follows the structural-phenomenological method, such a procedure is characterised with reference to Fink (1957) and Loch (1983) and determined by the systematic exploration of different forms (description of phenomena), in the process it is not the information or the meaning in modes of expression that is "interpreted" (Loch, 1983), but "the meaning 'inserted' in the first place" so that the phenomena become comprehensible and understandable. Thus, it is not about an "interpretation of interpretation" (Fink, 1957) as in hermeneutics, i.e. the interpretation and interpretation of meaning, but about the "insertion (introjection or attribution)" (Loch, 1983a) and the character of "ascription": "Scientific insight is, as such, insight from the reason (as basement and foundation). To recognise the reason for something is to recognise the necessity of it behaving in such and such a way" (Husserl, 1900).
Structural phenomenology "tries to work its way into the inner structure of things" (Rombach, 1994) in order to show new, different theoretical views or new perspectives and points of view from the known and familiar. The focus is on finding "constant structures" (Danner, 2006) across theories and models and through multiple variations. According to Rombach (1994), the special "approach of structural phenomenology" is when "it succeeds" in capturing structures that "underlie" one or more theoretical worldviews as well as life: Basic configurations of structures "can confirm and reinforce each other [... as well as] imitate, perhaps [vividly evident via shape perception] even repeat". At the same time, phenomenology as a theory, method and "doctrine of phenomena" (Loch, 1983) also pays attention to the human being "who relates to the world in an acting and suffering, feeling and sensing, perceiving and thinking, creating and consuming way" and thus shows the "multiplicity" and "diversity" which - in order to gain form and meaning - must in turn be expressed, represented and symbolised (Cassirer, 1942; Rombach, 1980). The method thus has similarities with the morphology and anatomy, which are dealing with the study of the form and structure of theories and models.
This presentation is based on the structural-phenomenological method and analyses models and theories in terms of facts and contents in order to gain new, different insights into existing theoretical entities. For this purpose, various already published papers are consulted and re-analysed as well as theoretical connections in the sense of structural phenomenology are used as sources.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe presentation can show on several levels and perspectives that the didactic triangle can be connected with different pedagogical theories by means of sign-theoretical approaches. This opens up new, different insights into pedagogical topics, but also into the relevance of relationship and attachment for and in pedagogical processes and situations.
Many results are based on Gestalt perception, which is useful for the structural-phenomenological method and theory and with which many insights can be gained. However, this method needs direct showing to enable visual thinking. Therefore, the presentation shows both insights into the didactic triangle as a foundation of the pedagogical, at the same time the structural-phenomenological method can be shown through the approach.
The deepening insights into the didactic triangle trough diverse theoretical foundations and the possible connections with exceedingly different pedagogical concepts and theories is the objective of the entire contribution as a conclusion.
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Bühler, K. (1926). Die Krise der Psychologie. Kant-Studien, 31(1–3), 455–526.
Bühler, K. (1934). Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Ullstein.
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Herbart, J. F. (1814). Replik gegen Jachmanns’ Recension. In K. Kehrbach (Hrsg.), Sämtliche Werke. In Chronologischer Reihenfolge. Zweiter Band. (Ausgabe 1885, S. 197–210). Veit & Comp.
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