Question

Explain the psychoanalytic theory of freud with educational implication

Answer 1

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Freud is at least partly responsible - and his followers certainly more so - for the idea that babies have mentality. His ideas lead us to the conclusion that their mentation will be of the type technically called ‘omnipotent’, which means that thought and reality are not distinguishable, and the rest of life might be considered as the struggle to come to terms with the fact that ‘reality’ has its own agenda.

There are many educational implications of this theory, but I will limit myself to the earliest and therefore most powerful one. This refers to the nature of ‘curiosity’, without which education cannot thrive.

Curiosity might be thought of as amongst the instinctual drives; that places it in the same ball park as the sexual drive, and you can immediately see why. Curiosity, not just through its role in education, is almost as essential to our evolutionary survival as is procreation.

Instinctual drives are necessarily ‘energised’ to perform their function. I will not go into how they are energised - to be honest, I am not sure I know, and Freud’s theory of ‘libido’ is vague for the same reasons probably - but his incorporation of an ‘aggressive’ component in instinctual life makes sense in the following way.

One of the first objects of a baby’s curiosity is thought to be the inside of the mother’s body. This makes sense in many ways, since it is where he came from, but more pertinently, seems to be the origin of the milk so desired, and of the future babies that may be less so. This curiosity with the inside of the maternal space becomes the unconscious template for many other cultural and scientific inquiries in later life.

It would seem reasonable to suppose therefore that the immature imagination of the infant must find some kind of representation for conducting this fantasy exploration, and it will necessarily involve ingress where no easy access is provided. Such a fantasy is therefore inherently aggressive, and requires some aggressive thinking to be sanctioned, although the degree of aggression may vary enormously. One can imagine a baby that is hungry or has cholic entertaining different fantasies from one less challenged.

Because, as we noted earlier, infants cannot distinguish thought from reality for a considerable period of their development, fantasies that are aggressive can cause anxiety about destroying the object. If this anxiety exceeds certain levels, natural aggression may be inhibited in various ways. One of the devastating consequences of this can be that the aggression which might be channeled into curiosity is withheld, in order to protect the mother from imagined damage. Later down the line we may find an individual whose curiosity seems to be dulled, who seems academically unmotivated and even educationally handicapped.

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