Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

What Educational Psychology Can Learn from Psychoanalysis 635
is that psychic relations are mostly unconscious. And so, object relations is mainly about how
one unconscious relates to another. Object relations theorists argue that children develop internal
objects, which are impressions and phantasises of their mothers and other important people.
These ghostly representations housed in the unconscious then get projected onto the real mother
and others. So what is real and what is psychically created gets confused. The idea for object
relations theorists is mostly that one untangles these internal objects so that one can relate more
freely with others, and not get trapped in the tangles of transferred objects.
The gist of these main schools of psychoanalysis suggests that what is important in our lives
is thinking about what is unthinkable, what is unconscious. One can only do this with an analyst
because it is difficult to undo repressed memories and internal objects. One tends to be blind to
one’s inner workings. Psychoanalysis is very helpful in the educative realm for the reasons I have
mentioned previously. But it is also helpful to the scholar who tries to figure out what to write
about and what to think about. Autobiography in educative sites, then, becomes important both
for teachers and students. The main lesson of psychoanalysis is to know thyself.
Educational psychology could be reconceptualized if it turned back to the work of Sigmund
Freud. Most educational psychologists, however, dismiss Freud as a fraud. I think this dismissal
comes out of a certain resistance to Freud’s work on dreams and the unconscious because these
are NOT quantifiable. But what child is quantifiable? What life is reducible to numbers, to
prediction and control? Psychoanalysis is hardly about prediction and control, those old ideas
that drive behaviorism. The goal of psychoanalysis is to foster free expression in children and
adults via uncovered repressions, which fixate persons in traumas of their youth. School violence
could be greatly reduced if teachers would pay more attention to the psychic life of children.
Students would not act out as much as do violently if they could talk through their problems with
analysts. In fact, psychoanalysis has been called the “talking cure” because through talking one
finds out about oneself. But until our psyches are decolonized by buried memories and repressed
feeling, we can never be free to act as we choose. We will always be slaves to the masters of our
unconscious and the Oedipal drama.
SUGGESTED READINGS
Fairbairn, R. D. (1954). An Object-Relations Theory of Personality. New York: Basic.
Freud, A. (1966/1993). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. New York: International Universities
Press.
Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. (J. Strachey, trans.). London: Hogarth.
———. (1914–1916). Instincts and Their Vicissitudes. (J. Strachey, trans.) London: Hogarth.
———. (1915/2005). The Unconscious. (J. Strachey, trans.) New York: Penguin Books.
———. (1930/1961). Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton.
Klein, M. (1940/1975). Love, Guilt and Reparation. New York: Delacourte Press.
———. (1950/1975). Envy, Gratitude and Other Works. New York: The Free Press.
Rucker, N. and Lombardi, K. (1998). Subject Relations. New York: Routledge.