Countertransference in the Classroom

We have become so accustomed to looking at the student's response to the teacher as the center of the learning experience, from the points of view of both traditional scholarship and humanistic psychology, that we often overlook the equally present, however repressed, dynamic of the teacher's response to an individual student, a group of students, or the whole class. This limited perspective, however benevolent it may feel to the teacher, is nonetheless a permutation of the hierarchical structure that the contemporary American student, often without understanding and clarity of purpose, is trying to change.

If the American university is to remain viable and survive as perhaps our most important vehicle for personal growth and reconciliation of the generations, we might try to begin to regard the classroom as an interpersonal situation—in which the teacher, like all the other members of the group, is involved—that calls for multi-perspectives. We must begin to develop what R. D. Laing calls a notation for dyadic perspectives:

Only if two people carry out reciprocally “successful” acts of attribution can any genuine relationship between them begin. Interpersonal life is conducted in a nexus of persons, in which each person is guessing, assuming, inferring, believing, trusting, or suspecting, generally being happy or tormented by his phantasy of the others’ experience, motives, and intentions. And one has phantasies not only about what the other himself experiences and intends, but also about his phantasies about one's own experiences and intentions, and about his phantasies about one's phantasies about one's

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experiences, etc. There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that these issues are mere “theoretical” complexities, of little practical relevance. There are some people who conduct their lives at several phantasy steps away from their own immediate experience or their own intentions. Family interactions are often dominated by these issues. An analyst or psy