Lisa Farley

Radical Hope: Or, the Problem of Uncertainty in History Education

Abstract Curricular questions of what and how knowledge should matter take on particular urgency when the knowledge at stake refers to cultural devastation in history. Whereas narratives of progress and discourses of “protecting the child” continue to dominate the public imaginary, a number of curriculum theorists have begun to explore the multiple ways in which educators have and continue to represent such histories in the classroom. This emergent literature offers a theory of pedagogy not as a set of skills to apply, but a way of asking questions about the ethical obligations, ontological crises and anxieties at work in efforts to teach and learn from difficult histories. My article elaborates on the problem of uncertainty from the vantage of two psychoanalytic thinkers who are also interested in the work of introducing the child to a world that fails: D.W. Winnicott’s discussions with mothers on the problem of “disillusionment” and Jonathan Lear’s discussion of “radical hope.” In bringing together these examples, I offer a theory of education that articulates what is hopeful about the capacity to tolerate the disillusionment of both learning from and living in difficult times. At stake is a model of history education that can survive the disillusion of the promise of certainty and still dream of tomorrow.

The “Shadowy Underside” of Learning History

In the Spring of 2005, a Toronto newspaper headline caught my attention. It read: Trip to the Acropolis ends in Ruins. The article tells the story of a sixteen-year-old student named Madelaine who was arrested for allegedly attempting to remove from the grounds a stone that the on-site archaeologist identified as a ‘‘marble antiquity’’ (Ross 2005). Madelaine was held in a Greek prison for two nights under a law passed in 2002 in place to protect the eroding artifact. The law ‘‘prohibits the owning, buying, selling and excavating of antiquities without a special permit.’’ Madelaine explained that she picked up the stone not with the intention of taking it, but rather to take a photograph, as she put it, ‘‘to show her mother about the size of the rocks.’’ After reviewing the case, a Greek court cleared Madelaine’s release and dropped all criminal charges on the basis of a ‘‘gross misunderstanding.’’ The newspaper article ends on a ‘‘lighter side’’ by quoting what Madelaine learned from her trip: ‘‘I’ll be able to go home and write a report on the Greek court system,’’ she joked. And with this, she sums up the entire affair with reference to a familiar childhood rule: ‘‘Look, don’t touch.’’ At the time I noticed this news headline, I had been working with Sigmund Freud’s (1936) paper, A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis. This paper is a piece of self-analysis regarding the events of a trip Freud took with his younger brother in 1904— almost 100 years before Madelaine. Freud recalls that both he and his brother ‘‘were both in remarkably depressed spirits’’ as they discussed the many obstacles that should prevent them from getting to the ancient artifact: ‘‘It was quite impracticable,’’ they

Psychoanalytic notes on the status of depression in curriculum affected by histories of loss

This paper examines debates about the meaning and value of depression in relationship to efforts to teach about, and learn from, historical loss. It is argued that depression is not solely an individual illness or biological aberration, but a trace and effect of facing the many and profound losses – of culture, language and life – that constitute history. And yet, where there is a tendency to privilege the negative affect of depression as a source of critical insight and remembrance, this paper turns to Andre Green’s (1980) concept of ‘the dead mother’ to examine the inhibiting effects of depression in the context of the inter-generational relationship between parent and child, and arguably, the teacher and student as well. Using a case study from education, I suggest that depression, while indeed a painful trace of loss, can hinder the capacity to represent and so encounter the sadness, vulnerability and lost omnipotence that history leaves in its wake. I conclude with some thoughts on the conditions needed to narrate the meaning and effects of loss that negative affect alone embodies but cannot yet speak.

A sex of one’s own: Childhood and the embodiment of (trans)gender

This paper draws on psychoanalytic theories of embodiment to theorize the child’s creative use of objects and signs to represent a gendered sense of self. Turning to Winnicott’s concept of “true self,” we extend this symbolic labour to the transgender child to illustrate the psychic processes of embodiment that contribute to a meaningful gendered existence otherwise obstructed by social hatred and transphobia. Through a reading of the film Tomboy, we discuss the conditions needed to support the child’s representation of transgender as creative, which, while unique, is also a human act of symbolization.

The failure of thought: Childhood and evildoing in the shadow of traumatic inheritance

Cast No Shadow (2015) tells the story of 13-year-old Jude Traynor, a kid deemed by his rural community to be a “delinquent” who ruins lives and never sticks to his word. The film opens on a roaring Newfoundland shoreline, a telling image of the crashing plot yet to unfold. Jude and one of his peers stand atop the edge of a rocky wall that is the final destination for the waves washing relentlessly below. Compelled by a dark opening within one of the wall’s crevices, their gaze is fixed on a cave. Jude explains to his companion, Ricky, “It’s a troll’s lair. I got books. This stuff goes way back.” Jude offers gold as the only consolation: “They feed on what you are most scared of ... [but] you can pay ‘em off with gold. It’s their only real weakness.” Nonplussed, Ricky responds, “What if you aren’t afraid of em?” The boys scamper down the cliff and onto a harrowing footpath in their bid to get a closer look at the cave that Jude does and does not want to see. Jude suggests they camp there, but Ricky teases Jude that he is too afraid, and too much a “weirdo,” to embark on such an adventure. Meters above the ocean, on a narrow ledge, the boys argue and Jude pushes Ricky, who tumbles like a wave onto the rocks below. Jude hears a throaty gurgling sound from within the cave. As Ricky is raked against the jagged shore, Jude battles a conflict between his fear of the troll and the cries of his injured friend. Visibly torn, Jude finally pulls Ricky to safety. Ricky has broken his ankle and now Jude drags his friend up the cliff until Ricky can go no further. Jude keeps shouting over the wind that he saved him, but Ricky only responds that he is going to die. Jude punches him, telling him to shut up and that he is not going die. The scuffle is stopped when Ricky’s grandfather arrives in a pick-up truck and rushes toward the boys. Seeing his grandson’s broken ankle, the grandfather bellows, “Is there something wrong with you?” Jude protests one last time, “I saved him!” Ricky’s grandfather is not convinced: “You little savage ... I saw you hittin’ ‘em! You’re a liar ... every word that comes out of your mouth!” Ricky’s grandfather storms away with the limp child in his arms, leaving Jude alone with his unbelievable side of the story. These opening scenes set the stage for a series of events that continually find Jude on the wrong side. Repeatedly, Jude is called out as a perpetrator and a liar, a story that he believes to be true

The child in question: Childhood texts, cultures, and curricula

What is a child? The concept of childhood is so familiar that we tend to assume its universality. As Davin (1999) notes, “We all ‘know’ what we mean by child and childhood. Yet its properties are multiple and elusive; its limits elastic” (p. 15). The lived experience of childhood is defined by the cultural and economic contexts in which it occurs, and thus, considering the vastly different experiences of children across the world and throughout history, it is impossible to imagine a universal definition. Indeed, the boundaries that differentiate children from adults shape the subjectivities of both. When we speak of the child, we are referring to the relationships, contexts and legacies through which the concept of childhood is mediated. Indeed, the meaning of childhood is always being negotiated not only by the imaginations of adults, but also by nations, markets, history and children themselves. Childhood is thus a discursive conflict zone upon which cultural, political and economic engagements are waged. This special issue’s unifying theme, “The child in question,” emerges, in part, from Davin’s observation: that childhood has boundaries far more elastic than can be held by the familiar notion of the child as providing unmediated access to truth or innocence. The title pays homage to the work of sociologist, Gittins (1998), who explores the shifting meanings of children and childhood and how those meanings impact the lives of children. Contemporary laws, educational policies and social customs about and for children, such as those highlighted in this issue, reveal the ways that the properties of childhood remain as multiple and elusive as ever. Precisely because the concept of childhood is complex and constantly changing, it demands critical inquiry, for as elusive and elastic as they may be, social constructions of childhood have real material consequences for the children whose lives they shape. For Walkerdine (1993), the challenge is to look at the ways that social discourses “cut up and shape reality” as well as to account for “the real effects they produce” (p. 454). “Something real,” she argues, “is produced out of fiction” (p. 454). In turn, the embodied lives of children can impact the metaphors we use to describe them. Duane (2010) describes this affecting dynamic of language as “the material grounding of metaphorical thought” (p. 12). The pages of this issue are filled with “question-children” who represent both the material and metaphorical qualities of childhood that complicate the fantasy of a certain truth. Indeed, for Britzman (2006), the question-child figure reminds us that uncertainty is the ground of research, including research about children. In her words, this child figure

Drawing trauma: the therapeutic potential of witnessing the child's visual testimony of war.

Countertransference plays an often neglected role in witnessing children’s testimony of war and trauma. A dual notion of countertransference, based on the work of Winnicott and Klein, is offered that involves both internal conflict related to early life experience and socially mediated notions of childhood, war, and trauma circulating in a given time and place. A drawing by a thirteen-year-old boy living in the refugee camps in Darfur is used to show how countertransference affects our interpretation of the image, even while its symbolization in language establishes the conditions for a potentially therapeutic response. It is argued that a psychoanalytic reading can supplement the “legal-conscious terminology” in which the Darfur archive has been predominantly framed (Felman 2002, p. 5). This expanded view of witnessing involves reading the child’s testimony both for the history of violence it conveys and for the social and emotional histories it calls up in the witness as the ground and possibility of justice.

Without discipleship: a psychoanalytic study of influence for education

While psychoanalytic and educational research consistently document a fraught relation between the two fields, they share in common the problem of how to influence others in the direction of psychical and perhaps more so in the case of education, social change. And yet, the changes at stake in psychoanalytic theory do not proceed from conscious effort or the right kind of knowledge. In this paper, I consider the problem of influence as an ironic registration marked not by the analyst’s intention, insight or charisma, but by her capacity to survive the disillusionment of these ideals in the face of the analysand’s regressive crises. Drawing on two analytic pairings (Loewald/Lear and Winnicott/Little), I show that the foundation of psychical change proceeds not from instruction or insight but, from the opposite direction: or, the analysand’s regression. For education, what remains is a question of how the teacher can survive not only the helplessness of her own helping hand, but also the hatred of this vulnerable human condition.

An Essay is Being Written: Between Aggression and ‘Just Words’

If education tends to be viewed as an antidote to social violence, this paper turns to Freud’s study of the ‘beating fantasy’ to consider the fictional representation of psychical aggression in scenes of schooling and being schooled. It is argued that such representations both express and fend off libidinal passions at the heart of student/teacher relationships, and language itself. Drawing on clinical examples and a controversial piece of student writing, I suggest that the teacher’s greatest emotional challenge will be to read with an eye for the unspoken communication of forbidden desire held in written iterations of Freud’s ‘beating fantasy’, without acting on her own.

The "Human Problem" in Educational Research: Notes from the Psychoanalytic Archive.

In this paper, I theorize fantasies of idealization at work in narratives of educational research. I take as an example one of the very first psychoanalytically oriented studies in the field: Marion Milners, The Human Problem in Schools, published in 1938. Evidence is drawn from Milners published book as well as from the historical context and archived disagreements that surround the studys unfolding. My aim is to trace how constructions of knowledge in research are shaped by unconscious fantasies that are the minds earliest resources for trying to make sense of the unknown world. The paper identifies in archived correspondence a tendency to idealize ones own knowledge in the face of controversy. To conclude, I establish a relationship between Milners turn to an overtly psychoanalytic orientation and her capacity to move from a defensive position of mastery to a creative position of interpretation. Nearly a century after its publication, I suggest that Milners study is prescient today for the way it raises questions about the status of fantasy and emotional conflict in narratives of teaching and learning that echo within narratives of educational research as well.