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In a passionate plea to his Association of Protestant Teachers audience Sauer challenges educationists to let go of the illusion that the education of the human race can be pursued through conscious attitudes alone. A revised model of the reality of teaching will have to include the unconscious, the emotional, and the irrational elements. Through dream-material collected over thirteen years he demonstrates how unconscious contents limit, disturb, and enrich teachers' learning and teaching processes. He invites his listeners to let the shadow in: to acknowledge hatred as the counterpart of a teacher's love for his pupils, to note how the presumed free spirit is chained to guidelines and directives, how indefatigability masks exhaustion, and ‘childishness’ shines through maturity.
In five groups of dreams Sauer highlights two kinds of unconscious ‘schooling’- processes running alongside conscious pedagogical work:
The personality of the teacher is deeply affected by the conscious and unconscious material of his/her pupils. In their dreams teachers became pupils, pupils became teachers.
The unconscious of the teacher itself presents as the teacher, with the teacher's conscious and reason as the pupil.
Dreamer A's dreams about her own experiences in school put her in touch with the young child's potential in her and they helped her to deal effectively with the wretchedness of early experiences of entrapment, humiliation, lack of understanding, and social deprivation which had compacted into destructive parental images attacking her capacity to master life. A set of dreams about examinations prompted another teacher to consider the feasibility of some of life's exams: not all tests set are appropriate, some need declining. Sauer interprets unconscious material about colleagues present during teaching episodes as highlighting the negative father-complex, which had in the case of this dreamer led to excessive compulsion to overrate and underrate her talents.
Pupils in dreams