What does it mean to be a teacher? Caught between the need to differentiate ourselves as professionals and the need to be recognizable, have we gone the way of the British School of psychoanalysts? According to Adam Phillips, in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, the paradox of the analyst is that they must not be anyone in advance, available for what is to come—the “perfect stranger”—and yet:
Mothers, as we shall see, were used by the British School theorists, as though they were a genus, to provide descriptions of what psychoanalysts were supposed to be doing. They became models for a new profession that had uniquely problematized the question of the model, of the production of paradigms. […] To avert the catastrophe of the potentially endless charade of identifications—and to preclude addressing the question, What do analysts want?—mothers were looked at, or rather observed, for the answers.
Is this not one of the classic roles of teachers? The surrogate mother. Or, as Plato would have it, the midwife. Which is to say, the professional mother.
But is not the professional mother the one who can never go back to just being a mother? There is perhaps something of envy in teachers, marked by covert hostility at times, of ordinary mothers. I cannot do the job of the mother for her…
If only…
Is it not this “if only” that the teacher wields as a profession: the limit becomes the strength, through ritualized reenactment. I am not your mother, I am your professional mother. This does not keep one from dreaming of being there first, of being the pre-oedipal mother.
The return is a cul-de-sac. There is no beginning, only the analysis of the fantasies of beginning, of their wishful improvisation. It is as though, for the analyst, in practice there are two temptations, two extremes: identification either as caricature, playing mothers, or as the willing victim of an open transference; either guru or blank page.
But these extremes are not so much exclusionary as strategic, the Socratic midwife is also the one who knows, more than most, that he does not know.
When the psychoanalytic theorist becomes wary of his omniscience he tends to make a fetish of “not knowing.” “In short,” Bion writes, “there is an inexhaustible fund of ignorance to draw upon—it is about all we do have to draw upon.” The skeptic always boasts.
Few teachers have set the context that would allow them to get away with the fallout from such an accurate boast. In general one must strongly suggest that one is feigning ignorance, out of humility or pedagogy. The implication is that there is always a remainder. Either I do really know or, even better, I know where the secret passage-way lies. The midwife as gatekeeper. But what gets codified in this feigning is not mystery but reliability. Wonder in the service of the pre-ordained.
There is, I think, an inevitable connection between the analyst already in position as the mother—and especially the pre-oedipal mother—and psychoanalysis as the coercion or simulation of normality. And this is the situation, traditionally, when Dionysos arrives.
Using a fantasy about mothers—about the beginning—to foreclose the transference turns psychoanalysis into perversion, perversion in the only meaningful sense of the term: knowing too exactly what one wants, the disavowal of contingency, omniscience as the cheating of time; the mother who, because she knows what’s best for us, has nothing to offer.
All of this to preclude answering the question “what do analysts want?”, or for our purposes, “what do teachers want?” The odd part is that it presupposes we know what mothers want. Or at least, what we want of our mothers. The professional mother is the mother who wants precisely what we want (but don’t know we want.)
Here the most cliche answer for our own wants will suffice, and indeed will often be vigorously defended. I just want to make a difference, for example.
Could it be that part of the satisfaction of this is that we don’t have to want anything ourselves? That is, what teachers might largely want is to be present and receive credit for not wanting anything ourselves. We will be like a mother, but professional.
Which is to say, even more selfless?
In any case, would this not also serve as a front? There may be a specific satisfaction in expressing no personal want, but might this not be the cover for any number of other desires as well? For any number of other identifications and roles having nothing to do with mothering?
Even when we pin it down the role of teacher eludes us.
Something in the idea of teachers as mothers makes the feminist and teacher in me lurch. Historically, teaching has been considered “woman’s work” (at least when it comes to primary and secondary school and non-administrative positions) precisely because of the way our society has genderized the concept of nurture.
In my experience, there is a tremendous pressure on teachers to be completely selfless with students. In many ways, people tout the nurturing aspect of teaching as the “most important part of the job,” but it is expected (and unpaid)—it is supposed to be its own source of gratification. Society encourages women, and therefore teachers to, as you say “be present and receive credit for not wanting anything ourselves,” but I am not convinced that this shrouds secret, selfish desires on the part of teachers. Rather, it more likely exposes the feminization and subsequent devaluation of the role of teacher.
Certainly, teachers and parents are both pedagogues; they help children/students develop ways of knowing, being and doing in the world. They both provide a measure of caring, structure and guidance. But I have never longed to go back to a student’s origins and take over as her mother. That would imply that there is one “right way” to parent—a proposition that is as restrictive and frightening as the concept that there is a singular, “correct” way to teach.
In her essay “Mind mother: psychoanalysis and feminism,” Judith Kegan Gardiner writes: “…the words ‘mind mother’ evoke the contradictions of women’s experience in patriarchal cultures, cultures like ours that define ‘mind’ as male and immaterial and mother as mindless mat(t)er whose responsibility is total and whose authority is denied.” Isn’t this an accurate description of the plight of today’s teacher? The current flurry of discourse around teacher accountability coincides with greater restrictions on teacher autonomy, highlighting the way we, like Freud, blame the teacher-mother while tying her hands.
Yes, indeed. There is something lurch provoking in the whole thing. To complicate things more, It wouldn’t just be “the feminization and subsequent devaluation of the role of teacher” that is problematic–this already presupposes a demoted political valence for the feminine–but rather that there is a masculine appropriation of motherhood in the name of education. If it is the mother who gives birth, it is the father/doctor who controls it.
Nicole Loraux’s “Born of the Earth” is an excellent look at how this plays out in Athenian politics. Although she doesn’t discuss it, I would take the birth of Athena to be emblematic here. Metis gives birth to Athena, but inside of Zeus, who controls the political consequences, and Metis drops out of the picture, allowing for the appearance of male birth out, of course, of the forehead. I take it this could be the flip-side of Gardiner’s mind mother, the masculine appropriation and erasure of motherhood. And I would agree with you, that this is precisely the plight of today’s teachers. You put it beautifully.
In this sense, I would argue that the condition you describe is a political double gesture, calling for and bracketing out maternal care at the same time. Thus it doesn’t “shroud secret, selfish desires on the part of the teacher” as much as it suppresses the full expression of (feminine) desire as such, in all its complexity. Could it be that a possible feminist response would be “who are you to tell me to care in this way? Is this the only way to be a mother?”
This is what the psychoanalysts would have missed, that in borrowing the image of the mother, they substituted the simplistic, masculine, idealized and oppressive vision of motherhood. As if one could simply borrow someone as a model…
I can envision a counter double gesture to the patriarchal one: education is not mothering; and mothering is not what you think either.
I think that’s part of what’s so obnoxious about what Karin points to: these are gender roles that society clings to long after they have been transformed. But they’re comforting lies. The all devoted mother, teacher, secretary, nurse etc. It’s a colossal lack of imagination that has people pushing, for example, teachers into an essentialised substitute motherhood of sacrifice and self denial. At this point most of us grew up after that kind of motherhood was no longer an option if a family wanted to stay middle class. But we still cling to it as the model of what motherhood ought to be and, by extension, what mothering fields ought to be. The really hilarious thing to me is how men and male gender identity are getting squeezed out as well in all this clumsy stuffing of people into boxes that never fit, even less so when the structures if life have moved on. Vestigal sexism to join vestigal nationalism?