Psychoanalytic Aspects of School Problems

School experiences are the first important experiences outside the family circle that involve a systematic separation from the home and where the child is confronted with the need to adjust to strange children and adults, and at the same time to perform tasks from which escape is difficult. The attitudes to the teacher, the classmates and the schoolwork are an important bridge between early attitudes to the parents, the siblings and the self, and their later expression in adult life. The component instinctual drives, sado-masochistic trends, scoptophilic and exhibitionistic impulses, oral and anal strivings, and narcissistic attitudes play basic roles in the learning process and its impairment.

School problems have been studied chiefly by child analysts. They are a relatively neglected area in the analysis of adults. The purpose of this paper is to review and comment on some of the analytic aspects of school problems, particularly on the vicissitudes of the learning process and to call attention to them in the analysis of adults. The content of the paper is based on a number of child and adult analyses and on briefer clinic treatment of a large number of children.

The good teacher relies on the sublimated energy from the pupil's component instinctual drives. She tries to direct, stimulate and gratify the pupil's curiosity and his wish to learn and to know. She tries to present to him an educational situation that will challenge his wish to mastery, yet allow for its gratification. She hopes to so regulate the pace of his work that it will not be so easy as to bore him, nor yet so complex that he experiences too much failure, and becomes overwhelmed by frustration. She depends on his wish to please his parents and his teacher, and on his own desire to achieve as well as he can, rather than on his fear of their displeasure or punishment, yet she hopes that both the rewards of success and the fear of failure will spur him on to effort and achievement. In the le