For the first time, educators and analysts came together officially at the Winter Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York City. This was the result of the launch of a new category of APsaA affiliation for educators: educator associates. The new category, coordinated by the APsaA Liaison to Schools Committee, was formed to meet the needs of educators who are interested in the application of psychoanalytic principles in the classrooms.
On Saturday, January 21, under the auspices of the Liaison to Schools Committee, the first Semiannual Educator/Analyst Symposium was held. Henri Parens spoke on the topic “Aggression: What Is It? What Causes It? How to Deal With It Constructively: A Dialogue Between Educators and Analysts.” Stuart Twemlow served as the discussant. There was also extensive audience participation, moderated by Phyllis Cath, co-chair of the Liaison to Schools Committee.
Parens geared his talk to educators and analysts who deal with aggression on a daily basis. He presented a model of aggression, the Multi-Trends Theory of Aggression, that derived from his group's research on infants. Parens proposed that aggression is a biologically generated need (an inner pressure) to act upon, control, and master self and environment. He outlined three trends:
Non-affective destructiveness such as feeding activity.
Non-destructive aggression such as pressured sensory-motor activity.
Hostile destructiveness, including unpleasure-related destructiveness such as the rage reaction of infancy and pleasure-related destructiveness such as teasing and taunting.
Parens contrasted hostile destructiveness and non-destructive aggression. Non-destructive aggression is inborn and necessary for constructive adaptation. It promotes self-assertion, achievement, and mastery of self and environment. On the other hand, hostile destructiveness is not inborn nor spontaneously activated, even though the mechanism for its generation is inborn. Hostile destructiveness can always be traced to an experience of excessive unpleasure, such as hurt, shame, or helplessness.
Parens noted that it is important to recognize that hostile destructiveness can be either heightened or lessened by environmental intervention. He urged educators and analysts to search for the sources of excessive unpleasure in their students and patients respectively. He concluded: “The great facilitator of reducing internalized or freshly generated hostile destructiveness is its experiencing and verbalizing in meaningful relationships.”
Twemlow talked about his research on bullying and how critical it is to intervene early and often to confront the bully's acting out of hostile destructiveness toward the victim. He noted that we need to identify the qualities of a school environment that promote a culture of safety and mutual respect.
Twemlow presented data from a study of 10,131 children and adolescents from grades 3–11 in a west coast city as part of a violence audit of the school system. In this mid-size community of public schools, the children were predominately from lower-income families; 73 percent of the school community was non-white. Four broad areas were measured: victimization of self, aggression toward others, perceived responses to victimizations, and attitudes towards aggression. The findings showed that somewhere between 10 percent and 20 percent of all children in all grades received a vicarious thrill and were not hesitant to express pleasure at seeing other children bullied. The middle grades (7, 8, and 9) were lowest in empathy for the victim and highest in aggression toward others.
In the whole sample there was worrying evidence of a slow social conditioning toward seeing violence as positive, feeling less distress for victims, and increasingly avoiding any involvement with victims of aggression. However, schools varied in the severity of measured areas of aggression. Twemlow proposed examining the differences in these schools to identify ways to reverse the trend of social conditioning to violence.
The next Semiannual Educator/Analyst Symposium will be held at the APsaA Annual Meeting in Boston on Saturday, June 21. The topic will be “Coping with Disruptive Aggression in Schools: Educators and Analysts Learn from Each Other.” A panel is planned with two psychoanalysts, Stuart Twemlow and Maurice Vanderpol, and two educators, Matthew King, Superintendent of Wellesley (Mass.) public schools, and Liz Arney, a program associate at Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO) and a former classroom teacher FHAO is a national organization based in Boston that works with classroom teachers in school systems around the country to promote active classroom discussion about personal and social issues relating to tolerance and conflict resolution. The panelists will consider some of the major stressors facing school communities, including violence, intolerance, and bullying, and discuss how educators and analysts can work together to enhance the learning environment. Audience interaction will be encouraged.
The Liaison to Schools Committee urges all APsaA members to spread the word about the educator associate category of affiliation. Teachers and administrators at all levels of education, pre-school through college, are eligible to join. Prospective educator associates must be sponsored by an active member of APsaA. Please feel free to contact Phyllis Cath or Jonathan Cohen, co-chairs of the Liaison to Schools Committee, for further information about the program. Educators who may be interested in applying should be encouraged to contact Debra Steinke, APsaA's membership services coordinator, for details. She can be reached at 212-752-0450X26 or .
Stephen D. Kerzner, M.D., is a graduate of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East, and an advanced candidate in child analysis. He is also a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (Cambridge Hospital) and has a private practice in Brookline and Duxbury, Mass.