Quotables

Towards inclusion

“If you can talk to me in ways that show you understand that your knowledge of me, the world, and ‘the Right thing to do’ will always be partial, interested, and potentially oppressive to others, and if I can do the same, then we can work together on shaping and reshaping alliances for constructing circumstances in which students of difference can thrive.”
Elizabeth Ellsworth, curriculum & learning theorist (1989, p. 324)

Education for democracy

“I worry…that when problems are not addressed…[and] get bad enough…some one person will come forward and say ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’ …That is the way democracy dies. And if something is not done…that is what you should worry about at night.”
David Souter, former American Supreme Court Justice (in Benen, 2016, ¶1)

In search of innovative fixes

“More than ever . . . there is the idea that if only we make the appropriate adjustment (in curriculum, in teaching technique, in how teachers are prepared, in testing, etc.), the school engine will then hum smoothly, and those test scores will soar.”
William Pinar, curriculum theorist & founding voice, contemporary curriculum studies (2004, p. 176)

Psychology texts for teachers

“Despite current understandings that hold the ‘study of consciousness, as well as of perception, memory, and cognition . . . [as] inseparable from the study of emotion and motivation,’ virtually every psychology text for teachers follows ‘a traditional format of devoting a separate chapter to each of these areas of investigation as if they were completely separate areas of study.”
Sandra W. Park & Elizabeth Auchincloss, teaching & clinical psychiatrists (2006, p. 1377)

Witnessing

“We need a witness if we are to grasp, know, and feel what we have experienced . . . Someone else, even if that someone is another part of ourselves, must know what we have gone through, must be able to feel it with us. We must be recognized by an other.”
Jessica Benjamin, relational psychoanalyst (in Stern, 2015, pp. 127–138)

To be good

“The need to be good in order to make up for being bad is a very different moment from the freedom of loving for its own sake.”
Michael Eigen, relational psychoanalyst (1981/1999, p. 12)

Education & psychoanalysis: a common goal

“Psychoanalysis is defined by its attempt to expand self-knowledge and widen the range of explicit choice”
Donnel Stern, relational psychoanalyst (1997/2003, p. 24)

Symbols (words, numbers, images…) are not neutral

“When we uphold and manipulate symbols in our mind…we are also evoking a network of experiences resulting from a life history of actions associated with that symbol”
Ami Klin, professor of psychology & psychiatry, & Warren Jones, neuroscientist (2007, p. 37)

References

Benen, S. (2016, October 21). Souter warned of a Trump-like candidate in prescient remarks. MSNBC. http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/souter-warned-trump-candidate-prescient-remarks

Eigen, M. (1999). The area of faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion. In S. A. Mitchell & L. Aron (Eds.), Relational Psychoanalysis: The emergence of a tradition (pp. 3–36). Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. (Original work published 1981)

Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297–325. https://populardigitaleducation.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/why-doesnt-this-feel-empowering.pdf 

Klin, A., & Jones, W. (2007). Embodied psychoanalysis. In L. Mayes, P. Fonagy, & M. Target (Eds.), Developmental science and psychoanalysis: Integration and innovation (pp. 5–38). London, UK: Karnac Books.

Park, S., & Auchincloss, E. (2006). Psychoanalysis in textbooks of introductory psychology: A review. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 54, 1361–1380.

Stern, D. B. [Donnel]. (2003). Unformulated experience: From dissociation to imagination in psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Routledge. (Reprint of original 1997 publication)

Stern, D. B. [Donnel]. (2015). Relational freedom: Emergent properties of the interpersonal field. New York, NY: Routledge.

Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.