Abstract

I hadn't realized I was so ignorant, Celie. The little I knew about my own self wouldn't have filled a thimble! And to think Miss Beasley always said I was the smartest child she ever taught! But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and studying and writing a clear hand. And for keeping alive in me somehow the desire to know. Nettie, The Color Purple The central tasks of pedagogy are, and have always been, to teach others how to teach themselves and to instill the desire to know. The difficulty of teaching lies in the resistance of both student and teacher to the truth underlying the pedagogical act. Resistance is a commonly-used term in both pedagogy and psychoanalysis. It could be argued that, within either discipline, theory encounters practice as a kind of resistance; or that in relation to a psychoanalytic theory of teaching, pedagogy as practice assumes some autonomy in resisting the theory on which it is founded. Unlike traditional pedagogy, however, psychoanalysis can claim a coherent relation between theory and practice as part of its self-definition: everything that psychoanalysis teaches derives from the dynamics of a particular drama, that unfolding between the and the analysand. Crucial to this drama is the education of the analyst, which itself hinges on an analysis that teaches theory through practice. Freud believed that no amount of theoretical instruction could convince his students of the truth of psychoanalysis even where there was a strong wish to be convinced. Consequently, he required that everyone who wishes to treat others by analysis should first undergo an analysis himself. Only in the course of this 'self-analysis' [by which Freud means 'training analysis'] . . . , when he actually experiences in his own person, or rather in his own psyche, the processes asserted by analysis to take place, does he acquire the convictions by which he will later be guided as an analyst (Question 39). The truth of psychoanalytic theory can be grasped only through the subjective experience of psychoanalysis. But this truth has less to do with the verification Patrick McGee is an assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University. Recently, he has published articles on William Faulkner, James Joyce, and contemporary criticism. He has a book forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in 1988 entitled Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce's Ulysses.