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A short while ago, I attended the opening of an exhibition, a 35-year retrospective of the work of Eugenia Butler, a conceptual artist who is also a friend. She and I were to embark soon on a series of public conversations in both psychoanalytic and art world settings. As I was carrying that sense of imminent “straddling,” I was pleased to see Paul Zelevansky, another artist who is also a friend, and we fell to talking. The perceptually cracked-open atmosphere of Eugenia's exhibition surely influenced our conversation.
In a few minutes, Paul touched his alive-sadness at the death of Mister Rogers earlier in the year. He spoke of discovering a radical pedagogy in those appealing television programs for very young children. He was using pedagogy to refer to the presentation and performance of knowledge and action, using the personal, the everyday, to get to the general and the phenomenological, a process that can lead to social and communal exchange. And this is a pedagogy that he now invokes in teaching art students at the undergraduate and graduate level. It was stirring to hear of this simultaneous breaching and bridging of the compartmentalizations of everyday life, and it may have been my anticipation of straddling that made me bold enough to ask if he would write about this for the Arts section.
What follows here emerges from Paul Zelevansky's many years of thinking about and presenting this material. As it leads us into the territory of our own “personal you,” the essay examines the rigorous thought that underlies Mister Rogers's gentle sensitivity. Paul Zelevansky's own pedagogy “keep[s] the focus on how meanings are shaped through stereotypes of the conventional and the normal, and why we are encouraged or inclined to assimilate or reject them.” As psychoanalysts, we may reflect that, throughout the history of our discipline, each new school of theory and practice develops in reaction to cultural and personal disappointment, and as each enters wider usage, a ne