Last night, I happened to read a promising, but in the end rather disappointing, New Yorker article on “transference in the classroom” (essentially this is about the student or teacher seeking from the other the love or approval missing in family or conjugal relationships). The effect of stale Freudian concepts addressed to current pedagogical issues was comparable to cooking up some daring new dish using leftovers that had already acquired an odd odor and color in the back of the refrigerator.
First, it’s certainly obvious that we need love; and, if it’s absent in one sphere, we seek it in another. I can offer my own life situation in recent years as a textbook case. But the author’s extravagantly egregious examples from literary and journalistic sources, approached by way of rehashed Freudian psychoanalysis, lend the subject an edgy aura of erotic frisson and medicalized soul-plumbing depth. What the author misses is the background of a general crisis of authority that affects the physician, teacher, publicist, or politician in roughly equal measure. The mental climate change has an impact in lowered levels of trust and belief—in an interior climate crisis. The New Yorker author insists that it’s, so to speak, in our heads and susceptible to psychoanalytic amelioration in the classroom.
My family was nearly destroyed seven years ago when I was diagnosed and then treated by means of harsh chemo and radiation therapy for an imperceptible tumor in the mouth or throat area. I made it through a winter of draconian treatments, but the double shock of not only cancer but of an invisible, incalculable tumor caused my wife and son to become tenacious adherents of alternative medicine. My subservience to false official medicine became the equivalent of treasonous infidelity. I bounced back from my low condition, but my once loving family shunned me for years. It helps to realize that my situation is contiguous with an invisible pandemic of shunning and isolation driven by the terrors of the unknown and by the fear of death.
And yes, I transferred the love and companionship lost from my family life to a circle of friends with roots in the classroom: Andrew Pfannkuche, who had been my student and my fellow member of the DSA, became a kind of Ersatz son. Laura Brenier who had been my Russian teacher via Zoom now acquired composite aspects of a sister, daughter, and soul mate. With Andrew and Laura, I could share feelings and thoughts that were proscribed by the unspoken but impenetrable boycott I faced within my family. Since I can’t spice up this tale with transgressive or erotic highlights, I would simply draw the conclusion that love, with or without “transference,” is always love. Love is a more or less transferable element that tends to take the shape of whatever vessel into which it is poured. Even though there is no replacement for a lost son, daughter, or spouse, it’s natural and proper to seek a replacement. Relief is impossible. What helped in my case was the emotional context which I found in a politicized comradeship and which others find in shared faith. In the common cause or in the shared faith, the all-pervasive and quasi homogeneous fluid of love can sometimes bond with and intensify egalitarianism. Political comradeship and confessional fellowship make their subjects into “brothers and sisters.” For Christians, the archetypal breach of universalized fellowship is the murder of brother by brother; the archetypal reassertion is the parable of the Good Samaritan. I sympathize, though it occurs to me that, if not for the divine Father’s favoritism, Cain and Abel might have gotten along well enough. Favoritism is the prerogative of the divine father and hierarchy is the inevitable consequence. I prefer the anti-hierarchical ambiance of socialism.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 