That Other Scene of Pedagogy: A Psychoanalytic Narrative

My discussion embraces the subjective qualities of the psychoanalytic clinical case study as a method for writing narratives of pedagogy dedicated to interpreting the latency of communication: what has been held back, forgotten, acted out and unconsciously repeated. At the heart of the case study is the literary dilemma of putting to words the transference, thought here as the unconscious desire for the other’s knowledge, authority and love. Of special interest is a narrative conundrum both educators and psychoanalysts share when trying to depict the felt qualities of their work: a great deal is experienced before anything can be known while learning from intersubjective acts is of a different order from anticipation of how things should proceed. The difficulty is that the nature of knowledge exchanged in either psychoanalysis or education may also carry a failure of symbolization, founded in a subjective gap within human relations and repeated in language. Here is where we meet the latency of communication and the question of education as human condition.