Psychoanalysis and Students Academic Performance
Introduction
Education is man’s oldest and best means of shaping future generations and of perpetuating his particular society. Psychoanalysis is our newest body of theory for understanding and modifying human behavior. How strange, then, that we are still without any psychoanalytic theory of learning. Psychoanalysis has a great deal to offer education and much also to learn from it. Unhappily the relation between them has been most neurotic up to now, like a marriage where both partners are aware of their mutual need but do not really understand one another and therefore cannot pull together as one. Disappointed, they come to ignore each other and go their own separate ways, though professing great mutual respect. The offspring of such a badly managed union might be likened to a bastard child. I refer to our present-day efforts at integrating psychoanalysis and education. Like its parents, this child is torn by the contradictions between them-too sickly to thrive, too schizophrenic to realize the inner split that ails it. Now I could talk at length about the loss to psychoanalysis because it failed to enrich itself with the insights of education. But I think the reader here is more interested in the other side of the coin-in what psychoanalysis has to offer that education has not yet made its own
Psychoanalysis and Students Academic Performance
Let me begin with a suggestion of Freud’s that education never took seriously-one that psychoanalysis, too, has done little to support. What Freud suggested, since the psychoanalysis of all children did not seem feasible, was that psychoanalytic insight is brought to all teachers. For the teacher, this would mean regaining her own repressed childhood memories, her reaching a better understanding of what shaped her in her own infancy and childhood, just as all children are shaped. Only then could she educate children in a way that was neither a repressive molding of the young nor acting out on them of old fears and resentments. The reason Freud’s advice fell on deaf ears is that both the psychoanalyst and those educators interested in psychoanalysis have thus far been carried away by analysis as a method of treatment. What both have neglected is to take a serious look at the goals of psychoanalysis and the image of a man they are based on. Because, while education and psychoanalysis may be similar in their aims-namely, to enable man to reach his own highest potentials, and in doing so create truly human society-their methods and intermediate goals are very different and are often opposed to each other.
What is psychoanalysis theory?
Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality development that guides psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology. First laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work. The psychoanalytic theory came to full prominence in the last third of the twentieth century as part of the flow of critical discourse regarding psychological treatments after the 1960s, long after Freud’s death in 1939. Freud had ceased his analysis of the brain and his physiological studies and shifted his focus to the study of the mind and the related psychological attributes making up the mind, and on treatment using free association and the phenomena of transference. His study emphasized the recognition of childhood events that could influence the mental functioning of adults. His examination of the genetic and then the developmental aspects gave the psychoanalytic theory its characteristics. Starting with his publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, his theories began to gain prominence.
Psychoanalysis and academic performance
Psycho-analysis has given rise to many movements and practices which have provided a stimulus to new education. It has changed the conception of education and intended its aim. Education is no longer considered as restraint to be achieved by external regulatory means such as punishment and rewards. The aim of education is the development of the whole personality – the development of intellect as well as emotions for socially desirable purposes. Psychoanalysis has laid stress on such psychological incentives as love, use of instincts, permissiveness and leniency and the child’s own will or interest. It has thrown light on and explained the variations that we find in the assimilation of various subjects among different children. This means that specific disabilities may be due to affective inhibition among other causes.
Psychoanalysis and Students Academic Performance
Psychoanalysis has explained the child’s resistance to learning in terms of unfavorable environmental conditions, unsympathetic and critical teachers and parents, lack of preparations and emotional blocking caused by anxiety and aggression in the form of phobias or due to inharmonious parent-child or intra-parental relationships. Psychoanalysis, thus, brings out the importance or proper environment for the education of children. The environment in the school and in the home should be such as to reduce the chances of repression and increase the chances of sublimation. It should provide opportunities for spontaneous and creative activities and for all sublimations. Psychoanalysis has stressed the significance of play in the education of children. Play along with other natural interests of children should determine the various curricular and co curricular activities in the school. This emphasis play has given rise to play therapy and play-way as important techniques in the treatment of scholastic and emotional problems.
That psychoanalysis has given impetus to such movements as ‘child guidance’, mental hygiene, ‘paido-centricism’ as well as “freedom of the child”, cannot be denied. The latter has popularized such concepts as ‘free discipline’. Importance of respecting the child’s individuality at an early age, of studying the early years of the child, of evaluating the standards of behaviour from a new angle, of recognising the strength of sex-impulse and sex-education are the other contributions of psychoanalysis to education. One of the significant contributions, however, is the understanding that psychoanalysis has imparted of ‘mal-adjustments’ in children’s behaviour and delinquencies in adolescence. Emotional conflicts due to defective inter-personal relationships within the family, repression of the child’s between the unconscious needs and the demand or reality have been highlighted as important causes without minimizing the significance of the inadequate environmental conditions such as the broken home, poor economic situations, bad neighborhood, inadequate school programmes, lack of proper recreational facilities and others.
Conclusion
To conclude, we can say that much of what is progressive in New Education can be traced to the influence of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis and Students Academic Performance