Psychoanalysis as Education -Adam Phillips

In his 2004 essay Psychoanalysis As Education Adam Phillips draws fascinating parallels between Lenin and Freud. He writes that Lenin, through education of the proletariat about Marxism, hoped to make conscious their exploitation by the bourgeoisie, while Freud hoped to make conscious unconscious desire. Both the working masses and the psychoanalytic patient were apparently leading lives dictated by things outside their conscious awareness. Both needed to be educated by an omniscient, if somewhat inflexible, other to pay attention to their particular blindspots. Phillips writes, “Education, like psychoanalysis and politics, is the art of attention seeking.” 

Lenin believed in education and pedagogy as a force of change -- for revolution -- despite the irony that education was also considered bourgeois. To benefit, people would then need to be malleable. While it is true that we can have a powerful effect on one another, Lenin did not seem to consider the idiosyncrasies of human desire. Freud, however, was very interested in desire. Freud’s understanding of the peculiar desires of individuals may have been the outcome from and the development of free association. Unlike traditional Leninist education (inform and get outcome), psychoanalysis’ “Free association is at once a new kind of information about the self, and a new way of learning about the self…[with] no preformed content [and] no predictable outcome.”

Phillips sees psychoanalysis as a contribution to the debate on education (more than to medicine) for it is “an opportunity to explore the ways in which people inform each other.” Why, for example, do patients not make use of the new knowledge presented to them? Phillips says it is because annoying interpretations may be experienced as impositions or ‘impingements’ (Winnicott) or, worse, as trauma. He also notes, as Freud did, that the object of desire, along with suffering and stasis, is the past and its forbidden objects of desire. [I prefer to think that people do not seek suffering but connection, and they have learned through experience that suffering is the price paid for connection. I also think of Bromberg’s ‘staying the same while changing,’ that is, that patients, while expanding and acquiring new parts of themselves, do not wish to lose the former parts of themselves, even the sad and dysfunctional parts. Thus, we need the old and the new in conversation with one another, held in tension.]  

Phillips [questions] whether psychoanalysis is free from persuasion and suggestion, yet sees the analyst as a new, different kind of teacher, “A teacher who does something that lets the patient let himself know about himself.” Phillips also questions Freud’s analogy of the psychoanalyst as teacher, superior, a lover of truth, and, thus, exempt from sham and deceit. Freud saw psychoanalysis as an education meant to overcome resistance. Freud said psychoanalysis was an “after-education,” unlearning (resistances) and relearning (satisfactions). Respectively, life is risks evaded and risks courted, says Phillips.

Phillips remains loyal to traditional psychoanalysis when he writes, “If there is a subject of psychoanalysis it is whatever obstructs speaking and listening.” [Traditionally, the obstructions were ‘resistances’ and the purview of defense analysis by ego psychologists. But perhaps Phillips intends a broader array of obstructions: the dissociation of the analyst? the lack of developing a ‘secure base’ from which to explore the inner world?] Contemporary and elegant, he adds, “Listening to speak and listen...experiments with wanting and being wanted, because wanting and being wanted are always an experiment. But unlike scientific experiments they can never be replicated.”

Phillips does note, as he says Freud noted, that “love is the greatest educator” -- even forbidden incestuous love has something to teach -- and this love as teacher is in keeping with parenting, and with research in education which shows that students learn better when they like their teachers and when their teachers like and believe them to be educable.