Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Psychoanalysis
CHAPTER 75
What Educational Psychology Can Learn
from Psychoanalysis
MARLA MORRIS
Psychoanalysis is the study of the psyche in the context of social relations. Founder Sigmund
Freud argued that psychoanalysis could help one uncover repressed emotions so as to free one
of all sorts of psychological resistances that keep one from fully developing as a human being.
Some of these resistances, further teased out by Freud’s daughter Anna Freud (1966/1993), are
these: reaction formation, reversal, turning against the self, introjection, projection, transference,
regression undoing, and more. Educators might begin to better understand students who are
resistant to learning if they understand the ways in which the psyche protects itself from what is
new and threatening. If a student acts out in class, it usually has to do with some deeper repressed
feeling the student transfers onto the teacher or the texts being studied.
Employing psychoanalysis educational psychologists are able to dig deeper into the most basic
and primordial dimensions of the mind. Traditionally concerned with the forces of irrationality and
the ways they shape thinking, consciousness, and one’s everyday actions, psychoanalysis moves
educational psychologists to explore new dimensions of the learning process. Any dynamic that
shapes student action in a way that is contradictory to the manner in which traditional educational
psychology frames the learning process is very important. Indeed, it is psychoanalysis that allows
educational psychology to view the formation of identity from unique vistas not attainable in the
mainstream of the discipline.
In such a process psychoanalysts often discern the unconscious processes that create resistance
to progressive change and induce self-destructive student (and teacher) behavior. Psychoanalysis
offers hope to progressive educational psychologists concerned with social justice and the related
effort to transform the elitism of cognitive studies. When psychoanalysts take into account the
Deweyan, Vygotskian, and more recently the poststructuralist rejection of Freud’s separation
of the psychic form the social realm, psychoanalysis becomes a powerful tool in educational
psychology.
Psychoanalysis is helpful to teachers especially so that they do not project their prejudgments
onto their students. If they work through their unconscious repressions with the help of an analyst,
they probably would become better teachers because they become more aware of their psychic
formations and tendencies toward projection. Psychoanalysis is particularly helpful in the face of
conflict in the classroom. How to psychologically manage students’ outburst or refusals to learn