Britzman (2017) parallels the work of Freire and Klein, to extend psychoanalysis into the field of pedagogy. “My inquiry into the pain of symbolization focuses on the emotional work of losing while coming to know the world of others through the passage of one’s history of attachments to loss of loved and hated objects. I lean on a psychoanalytic reading of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his call for a radical humanization to release the hold of oppression with a pedagogical reading of Melanie Klein’s Love, Guilt, and Reparation and her rethinking on the constitutive force field of infantile depression as related to the depressive position and its drive for symbolization and the urge for reparation of self with others” (84). Ultimately, Britzman develops a coherent argument paralleling the losses and deprivations which constitute psychical and social loss. What do these losses do to the collective and personal? What is the role of educator and psychoanalyst? Both forms of grief, depression and oppression, can be thought through coherently in Britzman’s piece. Quotes & Questions:
- “If, however, we speak of the oppressor and the oppressed as out there, assume knowledge of social and material casualties, and if we acknowledge discrimination and hatred as both mental and social facts made to wreck thinking and disclaim the significance of everyday interactions, within recessive depression a catastrophe has already happened and no such external couple exists” (83).
- “Psychical and social loss marks our work, loss of self and other unconsciously impresses our understanding of transformation, and all of this affects what we can symbolize as becoming transformed” (84).
- “Freire and Klein developed the claim that putting together a fragmented world includes the self’s deep awareness of what tears it apart along with what we tear apart in the self without knowing why. Their vocabulary, so different in temporality and idiom — for Freire, the struggle for liberation, and for Klein, concern for the internal world — gives pedagogy and psychoanalysis a measure of resignation due, in part, to overdetermination, to the unconscious, to the oscillating paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, to human incompleteness, and to accepting the slow work of symbolizing the aftereffects of a history of loss agonized by both structurally induced impoverishment and injustice and fear of vulnerability and dependency. I place the interminable work of mourning and melancholia within these inner and outer dialogues on love and its loss” (94).
- “The pedagogue and analyst are affected and wander, side by side, into the transference thickets between the psychical and the social. Even our interpretations carry traces of what remains as inchoate loss, along with attempts to auscultate the heart. We are back as well to Kristeva’s pressing question, now directed to the terrible uncertainties and violence of our own time: how, then, without being ‘a master of thought,’ and ‘under what conditions’ do we call upon the very thing that tears us apart?” (95).
As anthropologists, what kinds of meanings and practices can we take from this piece? What are the psychoanalytic theories on grief, trauma and depression that can be brought into everyday practice? Where are the lines between pedagogue and analyst? How are they defined if in fact, they are quite resonant?