Education

September 2015 Newsletter

“I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit… My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited… I think that I am superior… in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully... What is far more important, my love of natural science has been steady and ardent.”

– Charles Darwin, 1881

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

– Albert Einstein, 1952

Education – Part I
Over the past several months, we have been examining the pillars of human development: Affects (Feelings), Language, and Cognition. Currently, we are exploring four aspects of the human condition through the feelings-language-cognition lens: Verbalization of Feelings, Physical Punishment—And Violence, Education, and Religion. In the August, 2015 Newsletter, we discussed Physical Punishment—And Violence. This month and next we will take a look at Education.

Definitions and Development

So what does education and educate mean?

Educational philosophy and policy have spawned a massive literature and a huge variety of alternative methods. So what does education and educate mean? Merriam-Webster’s has a variety of definitions: to provide schooling for; to train; to provide with information; to inform.

Let’s examine this question through the process of development—i.e. the reciprocal interaction between the internal world and feelings of infants and children, and the environment of parents, caregivers, and teachers. The very title of one of Donald Winnicott’s best-known books says it all: The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment… that is, the processes within the child, and the enhancing environment outside the child. In the 1980s, a teacher/education conference produced a comprehensive study of this issue of development and education: Learning and Education: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Field et al., 1989).

By now, you may know I am a psychiatrist and a child and adult psychoanalyst. So what do my colleagues and I see and hear clinically from the children and adolescents whom we treat? One of the most prominent problems they come in with is boredom and frustration in school. This may be in part due to the inhibiting of the interest affect, as we discussed previously. The environment may not have been as supportive of their exploratory and creative and learning tendencies as one might have wished.

The boredom is particularly apparent when one discusses their education and schooling with them. They describe the hours of watching the clock in school—tick, tick, tick. And they talk about their frustration of having 7-8 hours of school and then coming home and having to do “homework.”

I must at this point admit to a bias, or at least a question. Courses on higher algebra or statistics, sociology and early civilizations, and so on have valuable concepts to contribute—but who remembers the specifics unless one is in those fields? This question applies to earlier education as well: Can concepts not be taught in a more condensed form? Do the kids really need to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Great Expectations to get a feel for conflict, character, psychology? (Why not just offer good psychology courses to these kids? That’s what they are really interested in.) Are many of these courses or the memorization necessary, or is the way they are presented the best way to get across some useful concepts? Is a full year of geometry really necessary? Are we trying just to contain and mold latency and adolescent children—or enhance their intellectual and personal development? Is what we are doing the best way to do it?

I am quite familiar with premed studies—the multitude of required chemistry, physics, and biology courses, and so on. In my opinion, most of these courses are not at all necessary in becoming a physician—with the exception of a few basic concepts in biology and chemistry, one will get in medical school and later training what one needs to be an excellent physician. Often these premed courses are simply used to screen out people. It is not learning the content which is important at that stage, because medical school will provide the necessary information. Psychologically, this often means people who are quite obsessive, often a bit schizoid, make it through this premed process, while those with more humanistic interests are less highly regarded.

Affect Theory and Education

[Silvan Tomkins] Silvan Tomkins (Demos, 1995) suggested there exists an ideologic polarity in Western thought. On the one hand is a humanistic orientation—a person as an end in him/herself, creative, active, thinking, driven by the individual’s unique internal feelings and character structure. On the other hand is a normative orientation—a person’s stature and value comes from conformity to a norm, a measure, an essence.

This polarity highlights one of the major issues which affect theory brings to the question of education—that of reciprocity. Do we “impose information” or do we “listen and learn”? We know the importance of the affect of interest—its crucial role in learning, exploring, creating. We also know how interest can be inhibited by eliciting the affects of fear, shame, and disgust. Winnicott, of course, raises these questions too in his concepts of True and False Self, and play, and, again, elegantly in the title of his book, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965).

The issue is reciprocity. In child development as well as “education,” do we impose or do we elicit? Do we talk or do we listen? Do we inform or do we learn? Or do we try to create a reciprocal process of these polarities?

Understanding education can be enhanced by appreciating feelings as motivators of behavior. In a sense, the popular concepts “social and emotional learning” and “emotional intelligence” use the integration of feelings and learning as a springboard for discussion. But in the material that follows, let’s see if we can be more specific about just which feelings enhance education, which derail learning, and how this happens.

Play and Creativity: Education and Affect Theory

Play and education are closely related. The concept of play has been the subject of a large literature. One synonym for play is recreation, or, perhaps better, re-creation—which conveys play as a process.

We are indebted to Donald Winnicott for so many insights, and play is one of them (see Playing and Reality, 1971). Winnicott suggested play was a way of reaching the authentic, creative, less-defended part of a person’s personality—i.e. the “True” self, in terms of his True and False Self distinction (1960). Another of his ideas is that therapy represents the overlap of the two play areas, that of the patient and that of the therapist—and if one or the other cannot play, then one must work to understand that dynamic.

Play is one of the major venues of all child therapy—as Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and others showed. However, play is also important in work with adults. The notion of play in adult therapy presages the development of so-called relational and intersubjectivity schools of thought.

Play is significant for development. Fantasy is one way children have of regulating tensions and experimenting with the real world. For example, in the face of various vulnerabilities and anxieties, young children will often play games in which they are strong superheroes or cowboys or whatever.

Much has been studied and written about play, and we would like to consider play from a somewhat different perspective, namely, that of affect theory. What is play, in terms of primary affects?

Play appears to be a process, primarily, but not only, dealing with the positive affects of interest and enjoyment.

It seems to involve oscillations between increases and decreases of interest and enjoyment. Surprise also is part of this process. Surprise quickly can become tinged with positive or negative affects. Even if a negative affect is briefly elicited (e.g. distress), a reduction of tension (enjoyment) can be experienced as pleasurable (i.e. play).

Tomkins (Demos, 1995) links play with excitement, and, as with other positive affects, discusses maximizing play:

“The child is encouraged and permitted to play with the parents, with peers, and by himself. Many interactions are converted into games and playful rituals which otherwise might be neutral, dull, or unpleasant. Play is regarded as an end in itself ” (p. 170).

Play is also closely related to competence and establishing confidence and self-esteem. Harry Harlow, in his work with monkeys, famously noted: “The performance of the task provided intrinsic reward ” (Pink, p. 3). Robert White used the term, “effectance motivation” or effectance pleasure. Competence was the “ability to interact effectively with the environment.” Mike Basch, in his book, Understanding Psychotherapy: The Science Behind the Art, brings these concepts together brilliantly to explain how our affective life relates to competence, confidence, and solid self-esteem in our character structure.

Play has often been linked to creativity (e.g. Brown, 2009; Pink, 2009; Amabile, 2009). Creativity, of course, is a large and important topic itself and has spawned a huge literature. One of the most consistent themes in this connection between play and creativity has to do with intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation – i.e. a person’s own interest and enjoyment versus goals, expectations, values from the external world. This somewhat overstates the dichotomy, but you get the point.

As noted above, Silvan Tomkins discussed the intrinsic/extrinsic polarity in detail (Demos, 1995). Similarly, Bertrand Russell suggested the terms creative and possessive: “I call an impulse creative when its aim is to produce something which otherwise wouldn’t be there and is not taken away from anybody else. I call it possessive when it consists in acquiring for yourself something which is already there” (1960, p. 130).

This concludes Part I of our exploration of development and Education. Education Part II will appear next month in the October 2015 Newsletter, and we will discuss “Early Education,” “Later Schooling,” and “What Keeps Us From Learning More? What Is Learning?”

REFERENCES FOR INTERESTED READERS

Amabile TM (1996). Creativity in Context. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

Basch MF (1988). Understanding Psychotherapy: The Science Behind the Art. New York: Basic Books.

Brown S (2009). Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Avery (Penguin).

Demos EV (1995). Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Field K, Cohler BJ, Wool G (eds.) (1989). Learning and Education: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Madison CT: International Universities Press.

Galatzer-Levy R (2004). Chaotic possibilities: Toward a new model of development. Int J Psycho-Analysis 85: 419-441.

Gedo JE (2005). Psychoanalysis as Biological Science: A Comprehensive Theory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Russell B, Wyatt W (1960). Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (First edition). Cleveland: World Publishing Co.

Pink DH (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books (Penguin).

Spitz RA (1945). Hospitalism—An inquiry into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 1: 53-74.

Spitz RA (1965). The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations. New York: International Universities Press.

Winnicott DW (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, 1965 (pp. 140-152). New York: International Universities Press.

Winnicott DW (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities Press.

Winnicott DW (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.

Zeanah CH (ed) (2000). Handbook of Infant Mental Health: Second Edition. The Guilford Press: New York.

Physical Punishment – And Violence

In last month’s Newsletter—August 2015—we discussed in detail the topic of physical punishment. The attached discussion and map outlines the international situation. In the United States, 19 states still permit physical punishment in schools, and no state has banned physical punishment of children in all settings.

Dr. Holinger's Recommended Children's Books of the Month

Appleblossom the Possum (2015)
Author: Holly Goldberg Sloan
Illustrator: Gary A. Rosen

Make Way For Ducklings (1941)
Author & Illustrator: Robert McCloskey

Set in Boston – an old-time favorite!

Book of the Month

Attachment and Psychoanalysis: Theory, Research, and Clinical Implications
By Morris N. Eagle

This is a small but comprehensive book on attachment issues, including history, theory, research, treatment, and more.

There is another perspective on attachment, however, which suggests that feelings (affects) are seen to underlie aspects of attachment, and attachment is mediated by affects. Or, as Virginia Demos (1989) eloquently put it:

“… attachment theory as represented in the works of Bowlby (1969); Ainsworth et al. (1978); Sroufe and Waters (1977)… argues that there is a preorganized behavioral, emotional, perceptual system specialized for attachment which has been inherited from our primate ancestors and is designed to decrease the physical distance between the infant and the caregiver in time of danger. By contrast, the view presented here [that is, Tomkins and colleagues] speaks of highly organized and coordinated systems that the infant has inherited from evolutionary processes but conceptualizes these systems at a more basic and general level, for example, the perceptual, cognitive, affective, motor, and homeostatic systems, which are designed to function equally well in the inanimate or animate world, and in safe as well as dangerous moments” (p. 293).

Ainsworth M et al. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: Observations in the Strange Situation and at Home. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Bowlby J (1969). Attachment Vol. I: Attachment and Loss. New York: Basic Books.

Demos EV (1989). A prospective constructivist view of development. Annual Psychoanalysis 17: 287-308.

Sroufe A, Waters E (1977). Attachment as an organizational construct. Child Development 48: 1184-1189.