Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Edward Liss compared the role of the analyst with that of the educator, emphasizing their similarities yet recognizing a major difference in the analyst's concern with the unconscious. He outlined briefly the history of the development of learning theories in various cultures from early times to their culmination in the contributions of Freud and Dewey, and called attention to some little-recognized links between the fields of education and psychoanalysis. Dr. Liss stressed the need for greater interdisciplinary communication, citing, in particular, the American Psychiatric Association Panel Discussion on Memory, and the work of John Dollard. He presented excerpts from the autobiography of Chateaubriand which exemplify that a high degree of intellectual development need not necessarily bring happiness either to its possessor or to his environment, and he compared certain learning difficulties to delinquency, suggesting that when the learning institution becomes a threat, the fault may lie with the parent surrogate (teacher), with the sibling surrogate (student), or with the symbols which are being used. Hence the educator, in order to prevent neurotic interferences with learning, must respond to the student on many levels.

Dr. Gustav Bychowski made the additional suggestion that the ego of the learner, when filled with preconceived ideas or unconscious introjects, may behave as though it opposed being filled with new contents and must rid itself of these false introjects before new knowledge can be acquired. In discussing the concepts of recompense and balancing, he pointed out that, although the teacher may have sadistic inclinations in reality, he may also represent the torturer only by virtue of the student's neurotic distortions. The student, thus relegated to the submissive role, responds to the imagined coercion by refusal to learn. The analytic parallel occurs when the patient uses resistance to retaliate for the humiliation which he fe