The Restorative Classroom: A Psychoanalytic Playground in a Public School

In one of my first jobs as a public school teacher, I taught kindergarten in an impoverished, rural town greatly impacted by the opiate epidemic. Many of my students were too dysregulated to sit and listen to a story. Instead of sitting in their chairs, they threw them. Rather than play with classmates, they bit them. Instead of cutting paper with scissors, they cut their nearest classmate's hair. Teaching letter sounds to these students seemed impossible. When I sought help from school administrators, I was asked to track behavioral data and reward prosocial behavior with stickers on a sticker chart. Nothing improved.

Eventually, I received consultation in using a psychoanalytically informed approach to meet the students' social/emotional needs. Then, everything changed. The children calmed, learned how to read, and developed friendships with each other. This paper examines the psychoanalytic playground that allowed for change, by reviewing one classroom that adopted such an approach. First, I proffer a brief review of the long, storied history of psychoanalysis in schools. Then, I share my experience of working in schools in a more typical, cognitive-behavioral manner. Next, I explain how I was trained to work psychoanalytically in schools. I share a vignette exploring a psychoanalytic approach in a classroom. Finally, I end with a question regarding how to bring psychoanalysis into public schools, once again.

For the sake of confidentiality, all names and other identifying information of students and staff, other than William Ketterer, PsyD, and myself, have been changed.

In Budapest, in the fall of 1918, Sigmund Freud spoke to the Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress, calling for a “bold and new direction in the psychoanalytic movement” (Danto, 2005, p.17). In post- World War I Europe, there was a burgeoning socialist democratic movement. Freud placed psychoanalysis in the context of this movement,