Conference Agenda

My PhD research deals with professionalisation of nursing student as a time caled ‘Professional Adolescence’. In this context, I was led to consider what happens for these students in their approach to patients’ death. To become a nurse, students learn in hospital where they experience unprecedented situations. Those new situations can be difficult, particularly when students are confronted with the death of patients. The heart of nursing work lies in the link that is created between the carer and the patient, which is known as the carer-patient relationship. Students are often very involved in this relationship, which can generate emotions for which they are not prepared. What’s more, care institutions don’t seem to give a lot place to the expression of affects in the professionalisation of nursing students. Mej Hibold (2019) has examined the professionalisation of early childhood professionals in France. They are forbidden to express their feelings towards the children, because this is considered unprofessional and the expression of affects is relegated to the private sphere. This kind of injunction to ‘be professional’ can be found among French nurses. The idea of ‘leaving your emotions in the cloakroom’ when you put on your professional uniform has been passed on from generation to generation of nurses. When emotions are considered, it is most often in terms of developing ‘emotional skills’, sometimes through procedural work. (Donnaint, Gagnayre, Marchand, 2015).

My research is situated in the field of ‘Education and Psychoanalysis’ and more specifically in a ‘clinical approach psychoanalytically orientated in Education and training’ (Blanchard-Laville, Chaussecourte, Hatchuel & Pechberty, 2005). I used clinical research interviews (Yelnik, 2005) with student nurses to explore their training as a period of ‘professional adolescence’. Particularly, this is a concept studied by Louis-Marie Bossard, a French researcher for future teachers (Bossard, 2000, 2001, 2004). Professional adolescence aims to understand the psychic processes at work in the transition from the student situation to professional situation, by analogy with those characteristic of adolescence.

During these interviews, the students talk, among other things, about their approach to death, which they had never come into contact with before their placements in care settings. The clinical analysis of their discourse (Chaussecourte, 2023) leads me to wonder how the uncertainty generated by the confrontation with death says something about the ‘professional adolescence’ of these students. The impossibility of anticipating a situation that has never arisen in the past, but which is certain to happen during the placements, puts the students' imaginations to work, which is very anxiety-provoking. During their training, when they have cared for patients right up to the end of life, the patient's death remains uncertain if they have not observed it themselves : for death to exist, students must be living witnesses to it. The discourse of carers is not enough to make it real. Finally, the approach of death makes the nursing profession very difficult, and one of the students chose to continue at school after graduation. She has decided to stay on as a student because practising nursing makes her future life too unpredictable. She needs more time to become a professional.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the associated government measures to contain the spread of the virus, in the form of curfews, the suppression of gatherings, social distancing and the switch to distance learning and generally digital formats in schools, universities, other educational institutions and out-of-school youth work, have led to a significant reduction in social contact. This enforced social distancing, combined with the absence or reduction of physical contact and interpersonal encounters, has led and continues to lead to a reduced sense of well-being, in addition to the general uncertainty caused by the epidemic and individual frustration, anxiety, aggression and varying degrees of loss of control, certainty, and autonomy.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of the challenges and uncertainties faced especially by young people has received considerable media attention. In Austria, this mainly concerns the results of the WHO HBSC study (see ORF.at 20/23), which shows an increase in mental health problems among adolescents. Various coping strategies are designed to maintain or restore mental balance. These are discussed by August Ruhs (2020), for example, on the basis of a three-step sequence of frustration, aggression and regression, by Marianne Leu zinger-Bohleber (2020) with reference to regression and omnipotent denial, or by Ingo Jungclaussen (2020) with reference to individual suffering according to personality structure. However, while the measures ordered to curb the Covid-19 pandemic sometimes place massive restrictions on young people's education, social interactions, space and leisure activities, digital game worlds offer a wide range of opportunities for experience and interaction.

Against this background, studies on the consumption of games by young people show that the amount of time spent playing games has increased since the pandemic (Yougov 2020). There has also been an increase in the diagnosis of young people with a computer game addiction (DAK 2020). In psychoanalytic-pedagogical terms, the results of these studies raise the question of the significance and function of young people's gaming in times of uncertainty and crisis. In this sense, the aim of the present paper is a critical discussion of digital role-playing games from a psychoanalytical and educational perspective as a possible strategy for coping with uncertainty. Due to their interactive structure, the simultaneous interaction and networking of several players, digital role-playing games are a particularly worthwhile object of research. Agency, digital relationships, and escapism can provide potential relief for gamers, especially during uncertain times. However, this can only compensate to a limited extent for the lack of physical interpersonal relationships, as is discussed in this paper.

The "Ich Zocke"/"I am gaming" study, initiated at the Department of Psychoanalysis and Education at the University of Vienna, aims to answer the above stated questions. In the summer of 2021, still at the height of COVID, a total of 15 young people between the ages of 11 and 21 were interviewed using a combination of narrative and problem-centred interviews about their experiences of the pandemic in relation to their gaming. Another survey was carried out in the winter of 2023, and will be followed up in 2024.

The planned paper will present the results of this study, focusing on the function and importance of games for adolescents in dealing with uncertainty.

This paper presentation introduces a study that connects Herbert Marcuse's (1955) Freudian theory of civilization with the concept of powerful knowledge developed by Michael Young and Johan Muller (see Niemelä, 2021; Young & Muller, 2016). The main idea of the paper is to build an interpretation of Young and Muller’s (2010) model of the three educational scenarios and the concept of powerful knowledge as the key idea of the third scenario through Marcuse’s Freudian concepts. This study asks: how Marcuse's concept of surplus-repression helps to identify the limitations and potentials of powerful knowledge?

Herbert Marcuse, a social philosopher and a member of the Frankfurt School, spent his entire career searching for an answer to the question of how human free self-realization is possible in a society organised through the principles of the conforming and alienating capitalist mode of production. Thus, hope is intrinsic to Marcuse’s philosophy, but not without considering its conditions.

Early Marcuse drew significantly from Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, in which being here (Dasein) means first and foremost an alienated coexistence immersed in social everydayness (Heidegger, 1978). Later, Marcuse (1955; see Niemelä, 2023) applied Sigmund Freud's (2002) theory of civilization, which is pessimistic in describing the development of civilization as an inevitable deepening of the repression of the instincts. However, Marcuse criticized Freud's theory for not considering the potentially liberating developments unleashed by the capitalist accumulation. Marcuse saw that the material wealth created through capitalist production has generated objective conditions for “pacification of existence” (Marcuse, 1991).

Marcuse adheres to Freud's assumption that the repression of instincts, for example by postponing gratification, is a prerequisite for the existence of an organized society. However, Marcuse develops the concept of "surplus-repression" to describe the repression of instincts, which stems from a certain historical form of society, and is therefore not necessary. In a competitive capitalist society, surplus-repression is the outcome of the collective reality principle that Marcuse named the "performance principle".

In contemporary education, the performance principle manifests itself especially in the popularity of competency-based education. Since society is considered to be in a state of rapid change, and the future needs of the capitalist production of value are uncertain, studying quickly outdated (sic.) knowledge is deemed as old-fashioned and not useful. Instead, it makes sense to develop competencies that can be flexibly used in constantly changing situations (Buddeberg & Hornberg, 2017; see Rosa, 2013). Young and Muller (2016) have criticized competence-based education for neglecting the role of knowledge in education and presented powerful knowledge as an idea to explain why access to truthful knowledge is in the heart of educational equality.

Young and Muller (2010) have created an ideal-typical model of three educational scenarios for the future, of which I make a Marcusian interpretation. The model describes two scenarios that represent the existing schooling, and a third one as a favourable path towards the future: 1) a modern knowledge-centred school where the truths of those in power are studied, 2) a post-modern learner-centred school with the focus on competencies, 3) a school that tries to expand the worldviews of new generations with powerful knowledge.

Bringing Young and Muller together with Marcuse allows to put the idea of powerful knowledge to a broader societal context from which is has been distanced. It helps to clarify the meaning of the three scenarios and powerful knowledge. The first scenario is represented as a civilization, where surplus-repression is produced with direct, and in the second scenario through indirect domination in accordance with the performance principle. In turn, the third scenario is reformulated as a struggle against surplus-repression with the powers of knowledge.