Celia Hunt

Learning in a Border Country: Using Psychodynamic Ideas in Teaching and Research.

Abstract This paper arises out of recognition of the shared importance of psychodynamic theory in our approaches to teaching and research. We demonstrate how psychodynamic ideas—broadly defined as encouraging people to engage more closely with thoughts and feelings that may be hidden from the conscious mind—can be applied in many, diverse, and radical ways. We also show how such an approach can be problematic both for students and teachers. In writing this paper we take issue with those writers who want to separate therapy from education, insisting as they do that ‘therapeutic education’ involves a ‘diminished’ notion of the subject who sees him or herself as a victim of circumstances. Instead, we suggest that entering the border country between therapeutic and educational processes and ideas can be deeply rewarding as well as empowering for teachers, researchers and learners alike.

Creative Participation in the Essay Writing Process

This article reports on a qualitative action research project which looked at the possibility that giving students an opportunity to explore their relationship with their essays through a range of creative writing techniques might enhance creativity in university writing. The project comprised a series of practical and experiential workshops, with questionnaires and follow-up interviews. The workshops are described, and themes arising from the different strands of the project discussed, using case study material from individual students. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives from psychoanalysis, literary theory and academic literacies, the discussion covers notions of genre, writer identity, creativity and play. We argue that approaches introduced in these workshops have implications for mainstream practice in ways that could enable students to feel freer, more empowered and more present in their university writing.

Salvaging the self in adult learning

Abstract This paper stems from a dialogue on the subjects of learning and learners: one forged out of experiences in research and teaching, and the application of psychodynamic insights, developmental psychology and recent work in the neurosciences, to thinking about adult learning and subjectivity. We argue that some notion of the self needs to be salvaged, in a poststructuralist and postmodern world, when considering processes of learning, teaching and, fundamentally, what it means to be human. We recognise that this is a complex topic and that we can only touch on limited aspects of it here, but our paper represents an attempt to bring new trans-disciplinary understanding of selfhood into conversations about adult learning. The paper builds on our other recent writing, which explored the border country between psychotherapy and educational processes, and between different epistemological perspectives, including the place of unconscious processes in understanding learners and learning (Hunt and West, 2006).

Therapeutic Effects of Writing Fictional Autobiography

This paper builds on research into the experience of students taking creative writing courses at Sussex University, which has shown that writing fictional autobiography and sharing the results in small groups can enhance reflexivity of self-experience. It discusses the nature of fictional autobiography, focusing in particular on two different kinds of writing techniques, referred to as ‘semiotic’ and ‘dialogic’, which, it is argued, when used in conjunction with each other, can provide a framework for therapeutic change. These techniques, it is suggested, are suitable for use in therapeutic settings, whether psychodynamic, humanistic or cognitive behavioural.

Autofiction as a Reflexive Mode of Thought: Implications for Personal Development

Hunt argues that looking at autofiction from the perspective of writers in the process of writing reveals it to be a cognitive–emotional tool that can help them to use their minds more reflexively and potentially to derive therapeutic benefit. It brings together Serge Doubrovsky’s reflections on writing his autofiction Fils, an explicitly therapeutic undertaking, and insights from Hunt’s qualitative research into students’ experience of writing autofiction for personal development in a Master’s programme. Hunt analyses this material using psychoanalytic, psychodynamic and attachment theory, as well as recent work in the cognitive and neurosciences of self and consciousness. Her central focus is on the role of the writing technique Doubrovsky calls ‘surveyed freedom’, which she argues involves the cultivation of a reflexive authorial stance.

Taking Care of Students and Ourselves

This chapter focuses mainly on dealing with pastoral care issues. Although university teachers may be, as Anna Neumann (2009) found, primarily focused on their subjects, many also care passionately about their students’ development, health and welfare. Whether through reading student work, listening to them in small classes, or seeing them individually during office hours, teachers often face students who are coping with a range of personal challenges including abortion, coming out, family deaths or depression.

Paul John Eakin and the Psychology of English.

The work of the autobiography critic Paul John Eakin, while coming squarely out of the discipline of English, attempts to join literature and psychology without relying on psychoanalysis. In doing so, Eakin exposes the sophistications of English to be based on a model of selfhood that is deeply impoverished. In this brief article, we attempt to follow Eakins own journey through and away from psychoanalysis as a means to open up a more general dialogue on the status of psychology in English, and to look at future developments in both disciplines. We will also ask how far this move has been propelled by the field of life writing that Eakin has so persistently mapped. Are the specific demands of reading and writing life writing useful in revealing the psychology of literature more generally, useful in opening up a self that is wider than the psychoanalytic?