“Education of Emotions”: Negotiating Difference in Psychoanalytic Training

In this essay, I highlight process and large group formats as vital spaces for dialogue and the education of affect through lived, in-vivo experience, making possible multiple, layered, transference reactions beyond that in one-on-one analysis. I borrow from Adorno’s ideas on the “education of emotion” to see critical reflection as a way of unlearning negative meaning integrated from the social surround as truth. With Charalambides, I assert that “discomfort is not damage,” but material for symbolization and containment. From complexity theory I argue that disruption and perturbation are opportunities for growth and change, and that in group work, as a distinct classroom, affect is educated through lived encounter and not just theorized. I see embedding democratic principles in group work and training as mutative, therefore clinical in its own right and an aspect of therapeutic action that helps candidates, faculty, and leadership negotiate power dynamics such as splitting, scapegoating, envy, and institutional enactments, particularly common in top-down cultures. I argue that involvement in large groups offers an opportunity to address these power dynamics by creating pressure to negotiate transparency.