When I was first asked to conduct teaching workshops at psychoanalytic institutes, I was somewhat apprehensive, because I knew from my time as an affiliate scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute that psychoanalytic teaching is a complex and charged subject. But after many exhilarating workshops, I am convinced that there is a place for pedagogical theory in the repertoire of the psychoanalytic educator.
It is not surprising that institutes seek educators to help them address pedagogical issues with their faculty. After all, psychoanalytic educators are a volunteer force, and they often have little institutional preparation before they enter the classroom. How can instructors who spend most of their time as analysts learn to lead productive discussions? How can they enhance participation when discussion seems stalled? How do they ensure that candidates actually learn something in their classes?
It is only slight exaggeration to say that the answers to these questions cannot be found in the thousands of pages that the profession has currently devoted to the subject. For example, two recent issues of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2004, 52.3, and 2006, 54.1) contained a section devoted to psychoanalytic education, but neither contained more than a passing mention of what occurs in actual classrooms. This omission presents a challenge to the field, a challenge that many institutes have begun to meet.
When under stress, most of us revert to doing what we know best. In the anxiety-producing atmosphere of a classroom, psychoanalysts in the roles of teachers often draw upon their clinical expertise to cope with inevitable pedagogical problems. As if in an analytic session, instructors may remain silent when an important subject is raised. They might refrain from directing the conversation, while waiting to see what will develop. They may even decline to answer explicit questions about the material or fail to create the space in which such questions can be raised. And, perhaps most destructive to the learning process, they may blame themselves or their students when things go wrong, rather than address the pedagogical issues that they face within the specific contexts of their psychoanalytic institutes.
Dawn Skorczewski, Ph.D., is associate professor of English and American literature and University writing director at Brandeis. Her publications include Teaching One Moment at a Time: Disruption and Repair in the Classroom and “Whose Neighborhood is This?: Negotiating Authority in the Psychoanalytic Classroom” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2004).
Students and instructors construct shared learning experiences together. As a co-constructed enterprise, a course succeeds or fails in relation to the involvement of each of its members in the knowledge-making process. From a pedagogical perspective, the teacher's explicit role is to provide frames through which students identify, discuss, and debate important concepts. These might include a detailed syllabus, a set of questions about the reading, and a preliminary list of issues that the class will address. The teacher's implicit and perhaps most challenging role is to provide a safe and well-defined space within which to do this work.
Educational theorist Abby J. Hansen suggests that “rather than seeing themselves as solo performers, looking for an appreciative audience,” instructors can learn from their students even as they teach. The psychoanalytic educators that I have worked with possess genuine interest in what candidates can contribute on their own, but they also report that in the pressured environment of the classroom, they often have to work hard to resist becoming solo performers. At such times, they are tempted to elicit information from their students rather than posing genuinely open-ended questions. Alternatively, in trying to avoid dominating the classroom, they may become relativists, afraid of asserting their own points of view, and thus lose sight of the goals of the class.
Are there pedagogical practices that take into account that there are concepts whose meaning can be taught without turning psychoanalytic educators into information-delivery systems? In teaching workshops, we take up this question in relation to the theory and the case seminars. In the theory course, for example, teachers of difficult texts can utilize a two-step process: First, turn the candidates' attention to the actual text, to what it says, where, and how; next, authorize the students themselves as interpreters of the text, rather than stepping into the role of expert-interpreter for them. Instructors might ask: “Where in the text do you see something that relates to a patient you saw this week?” Or “now that we have two theories of transference on the table, let's talk about how you think they help us understand the case in the article we read for this week.”
And what about the traditional case seminar? Very often, candidates report that they are uncertain about the goals of the seminar: What are they supposed to learn from presentations of process material? Instructors reveal similar doubts: What are the candidates taking away from their discussions that could be useful in their own practices? Framing the key questions and approaches that will be taken up in the seminar can avert this problem. For example: “In this seminar we will pursue the question, how does psychoanalytic theory inform our practice?” Or: “Let's return to our focus on what is analytic about the clinical work. Where in what you have heard does the analyst employ analytic terms or techniques?” Returning to such questions at each class meeting can focus the group on its learning goals and make possible discussions of the learning process.
Having a focus, keeping it simple, and encouraging debate: three sure ways to find a balance in any classroom. To my mind, these strategies lead us in more productive directions than comments about “resistant” or “badly analyzed candidates.” In my experience, while candidates' performances in class might indicate something about individual candidates, problems in psychoanalytic education more commonly stem from the lack of attention to pedagogy as a primary function in the psychoanalytic classroom. Remember, teaching is not analysis, and classroom learning is not therapy.
Fascinating complicated group and individual dynamics certainly manifest themselves in all educational encounters. But just as we attend to the “third” in the analytic situation, there exists in the classroom a “pedagogical third,” which involves neither the instructors alone nor the candidates alone but the knowledge that they construct together. In our most challenging moments as educators, we can return to two simple and related questions: How is the knowledge that we construct in this course assisting the candidates' development as psychoanalysts? How do my teaching techniques move us towards that goal?