Editor's Column: Psychoanalysis and Education

In addition to being a prerequisite for much individual accomplishment and fulfillment, education is widely recognized as a key element in social change, functioning either as a vehicle for change or as an impediment to it. In many ways the most powerful of the ideological state apparatuses, education plays its dual role in social change in part by inculcating values, ideals, beliefs, and knowledge that work either to support or to undermine the status quo. In addition, by providing knowledge, skills, and other cognitive and emotional capacities to the disenfranchised, education functions as a primary means through which members of oppressed groups can become empowered. And finally, by developing in members of the empowered classes the cognitive and emotional capacities that are necessary for qualities such as empathy and vision, education nurtures the psychological roots of justice and humanitarianism. Those who wish to promote greater justice and reduce suffering thus often look to education to produce these ends.

Their hopes are often frustrated, however, because students frequently fail to learn what their teachers are trying to teach them. Usually their teachers attribute the students' failure to learn to lack of cognitive ability or intelligence, or lack of interest or motivation, and respond with redoubled efforts to instruct, interest, motivate, and/or inspire their students. Such assumptions on the part of educators are of course valid, as far as they go. But what they fail to recognize is that not only motivation but also interest and even cognitive ability have psychodynamic foundations, and that these psychodynamic foundations can be engaged in ways that can overcome many of the obstacles to learning. Psychoanalysis thus has much to offer education.

Intrapsychic Conflicts Between Identity and Knowledge

In the first place, psychoanalysis can help us recognize and intervene in various kinds of psychodynamic obstacles to lear