Orange as Educator

Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you that the true, original meaning and basic stuff of your nature is something completely incapable of being educated or formed and is in any case something difficult of access, bound and paralyzed; your educators can be only your liberators.

Educators, in Nietzsche’s sense, free us. They do not pressure us to conform to ideals given from the outside; they do not require our submission; they do not accept our self-denying contortions or our self-abasement as the price of entry. Rather our educators gently help us to see our basic constructs—“the original meaning and basic stuff,” as Nietzsche says, “of our nature” (1997, p. 129). They reveal the emotional patterns that govern our sense of self. Our educators help us to “understand,” as Donna Orange has it, “in what relational contexts we became the people who participate and experience as we do” (Orange, 2009, p. 237). They help us to see the parts of ourselves that are “difficult of access”–those pre-reflective convictions that shape our expectations of ourselves and others but are not always available for reflection. Our educators encourage us to see the parts of ourselves that are bound by thousands of unspoken commands—“thou shalt” or “you should”—that contain us as they constrain us. They help us to see the parts of ourselves paralyzed by expectation. They see us, and in leaving our core convictions about ourselves “unblamed and ever less shamed,” they reanimate us, reawaken our vitality (2009, p. 247). Donna Orange was one of my supervisors. But more. She was one of my educators.

We both trained first as philosophers—her doctoral work focusing on the development of the religious ideas of C.S. Pierce and mine on, as may already be obvious, the work of Friedrich Nietzsche—before training as psychoanalysts—her at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity in New York and me at the Institute of Contemporary Ps