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When the going gets tough (the weak get weaker): Primitive Mental States and Emotional Traumas in Students’ attempts to (not) learn.
Faculty of Economics and
Social Science
Draft,
Spring 2000 |
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This paper arises out of experiences of working with undergraduate students in my capacity as Study Skills advisor and out of my increasing realisation that prevailing models of study skills teaching were hopelessly inadequate for understanding, let alone diagnosing and remedying, a series of responses from students to their work which were, rather then simply being “defective”, in some cases deluded and in others frankly psychotic. This is not to say the students in question suffered from psychiatric disorder but rather that there were psychotic or primitive mental states at work which were activated by their attempts to engage with academic work. These states of mind seemed to me to require a language of psychoanalytic understanding that fitted uneasily with the cognitive (and sometimes humanistic) educational psychology of the study skills literature.
I was also becoming more and more aware of strong the strong feelings engendered in both myself and my colleagues on marking the work of students who had not performed well. These feelings included despair, helplessness, disbelief, contempt, hatred and occasionally horrified amusement at what we saw reflected back in written work. At times, it was like being “hate-bombed”. At others, one could only wonder what had happened to the ideas - intact, dynamic and complex when taught - and somehow derelict, desiccated, and distorted beyond recognition when returned. If reading this kind of work represented some kind of counter-transferential phenomena, and I believe it did, then there was something was clearly happening. Powerful emotional states were being communicated by impact (Casement 1985). The description given by a psychoanalyst of working with a very disturbed patient reminded me very powerfully of the experience of marking: she notes “My communications were forced back into me causing me great anxiety and pain. I realised we were in the field of the anti-container and were bereft of any means to communicate, absorb or dream together” (Van Buren 1998) I wanted to look at what these communications might be and to try and use a psychoanalytic perspective, mainly post-Kleinian, to explicate the processes. I also wanted to explore the scope for intervention in these processes and the extent to which these interventions could be incorporated into how we teach our students to learn.
The paper is divides in to sections. In the first section I explore the study skills literature and the shortcomings of the cognitive skills or “training” emphases which dominate them. In the second section I introduce some of the ideas I have used to help me make sense of both my experience and students’ experience of learning when “the going gets tough”. These ideas come mainly from the work of Bion, though I have borrowed from the sets of understandings embedded in Object Relations when it seemed to help. In the third section I discuss the findings from interviews with students focusing on their emotional experiences as learners. Finally, I try to assess (a) what sense can be made of these experiences using the theoretical framework outlined above and (b) what implications, if any, follow for our thinking about how we deliver teaching and support learning. 1. The Place of Emotion in Study Skills Education; “The Demon of Irrationality”(Gay 1988)
Study skills education is very much a 1980’s phenomena. In this sense, its rise as an educational practice is inextricably linked with expansion in higher education. It is also a product of a highly cognitive and rationalist approach to learning. This is perhaps unsurprising. By definition, study skills addresses the issues of skills and not the psychodynamics of learning or any other educational model.
The primacy of rationality and ‘managability’ in study skills literature is a powerful and consistent rhetoric. In so far as emotion is recognised at all, it is as a hindrance to the task or at best in some something that can be harnessed in pursuit of the task. What ever the case, a strict division is made between emotion and cognition and the former is subordinated to the latter. Take for instance these pieces of advice in Phil Races’s (1992) 500 Tips for Students in the section "Facing up to Peaks and Troughs,"
Or, in the section entitled "Overcoming Problems,"
While this may be an crude example it is by no means an unusual approach to find in study skills books. More sophisticated and insightful versions can be found, particularly in the work of Northedge (1990) where there is considerably more insight in to the nature of emotions raised, particularly by writing. The advice however is familiar: recognise your feelings: work out what effect they have on you: work out what to do about it. Even in Northedge’s (beautifully executed) book it is as though the student has no psychic history, as though difficult emotional experiences are a temporary by-product of interaction with a particular educational task rather than being essential for learning.
Behind the cheerful optimism of study skills literature we can see an educational psychology which is informed by both the language of business and enterprise and the language of humanistic counselling. It is a diagnostic, problem-solving and optimistic model which envisages rationality as triumphant over the messy business of failure and human emotion. It is difficult to believe that these authors have ever taught real students. In the words of Hopfl and Linstead (1997 p7.) ,“what is often constructed as emotion is a pale and kitschified version of real feelings, a Disneyland version of the soul”. We might also add to this, though this is not the subject of this paper, that it is a model of learning in which power, domination, resistance and control are absent. Study skills takes place in a context of low contact hours with staff, inadequate library resources, “herding” and all the other shortcomings of mass higher education which we know have a deleterious effect on the quality of student experience. Yet one would never guess this from Race’s book, nor from any other. The model of the learner is apolitcal, as well as only occasionally bothered by emotional life. Indeed, the model of the learner is alarmingly close to an idealised self-employed knowledge entrepreneur. The student is encouraged to set about learning in the same way as someone running a small business. Race again, this time on "Taking Charge":
Emotional experiences are reluctantly acknowledged as a by-product of study, a possible outcome of the learning process, a factor amongst many in motivation or morale. With appropriate training, we can develop a set of cognitive routines to discipline and manage the anxieties, stresses, fears and issues of self-worth which are the unwanted side of learning. In common with some of the literature on management learning the question becomes “how can emotional experiences be mobilised to increase receptiveness to leaning”. This is ‘flirtation’ with emotion rather than engagement. However much emotion (and it is a distant relation) is “allowed” in to cognitive models of learning the premise remains of a split between emotion and cognition and along with this the idea that, ultimately, learning can be rational and managed. If we cannot ‘excise’ or ‘treat’ emotional experience we had better see if there is any advantage to be gained in exploiting it. If we accept that we will at times be overwhelmed by unwanted emotions, we are more likely to be able to put them to one side and get on with our work. Or, better still, we may be able to ‘grow’ from the experience, all the better to get on with our revision . (It goes without saying too that in this mind-set no link is made between unwanted emotions and political processes within the organisation).
So the answer then would seem to be an expanded repertoire of skills to teach students to manage emotions along side taking notes and planning essays. I do not wish to mock the approaches outlined above. In many ways they are a description of the trajectory I myself have taken as someone with responsibility for co-ordinating a study skills programme in the Faculty. I too have been guilty of innocent faith in that skills can be (fairly) unproblematically acquired, that improving one’s learning was a matter of basic training, information or skills acquisition. The problem was, I found, this mostly didn’t work. There was something very unrealistic in the discipline of study skills, in its poor grasp of motivation, anxiety and destructive unconscious processes.
This lack or gap was exactly the issue hit upon by Gibbs (1981). His book Teaching Students to Learn is explicitly anti-advice proposing instead a student-centred (as opposed to didactic) workshop method which promotes awareness and reflection of what learning involves so that students come to understand more about how they are working, specifically how they approach their work:
In the literature of learning and Higher Education, what Gibbs proposed was a methodology which encouraged students to reflexively explore their approach to learning (surface or deep, atomistic or holistic, reproduction or understanding). His understanding of the (mainly Norweigan and American) research is that reflexive knowledge about the processes of learning is what makes the significant difference. Interventions which caused the student to reflect upon his or her approach to learning rather than he possession of good study habits were the key. If this does happen in conventional study skills training then it happens as an unintentional by-product. Techniques per se are futile. What needs to be brought about is reconceptualistion of the purpose of study. The task of educators, correspondingly, is to be interested in students intellectual and ethical development, not their study skills.
I have a lot of sympathy with his critique of the skills industry. I too have tried to work with the received wisdom about how to run study skills workshops in which students were encouraged to try out and implement a range of tools and techniques.
To begin with, for students there a huge gap between knowing what they should be doing and actually bringing themselves to do it. The students who never planned their work, never read, never took notes or never wrote their essays until the very last minute knew what they should be doing. More surprisingly, so too did those who were aware that their epistemological stance was narrow and absolutist and would have to be changed. The truth was they could not bring themselves to change anything. The consequences were too disturbing for the coherence of their ideas. Some of the advice I could offer was sensible and practical. Some of it was political: there is, as Gibbs says, a fine line between teaching students to learn and teaching them to play the game successfully.
Secondly I had my own uneasiness about a lot of the advice I was supposed to be dispensing. It might have made sense in terms of good organisation, learning theory and the demands of the degree, but it often did not match patterns of work familiar to me (or, as far as I could tell) my colleagues. Speaking for them for a moment, my observation was that there was no one successful pattern, that the work patterns of those successful in academia would have purveyors of study skills advice throwing their hands up in horror. I could not take seriously the idea that I should plan out my schedule, hour by hour, for the next 3 weeks. Or that there was a successful formula for taking notes from lectures. Or that I could become super-humanly organised, all the better to do my job. Or that I could become endlessly flexible and enterprising forcing myself to cope with and accept a variety of didactic styles and dogmatic or pretentious academic material. And I certainly could not bring myself to teach some of the more rigid and bizarre formulae for successful study to be found in many books (eg SQ3R). “Advice” was often just plain unappealing.
Finally I eventually came to recognise that students do not follow advice because it is a threatening attack on something to which they are attached for reasons beyond conscious awareness. In my experience there was a paradox: the less happy a student was with way he or she worked, the less likely he or she was to want to try anything new. This is about more than the observation that, in the first instance at least, training worsens performance (because it slows down and complexifies what was previously done semi-automatically). I was at one with Gibbs when he concludes “I see significant learning as involving a degree of disorientation or personal threat” (1981, p87). Some advice, like significant learning, is a threatening attack which mobilises powerful desires to not learn and not to change. No wonder it was such an disheartening experience - for me and the students.
I tried a few of the workshops as recommended in his book. The problem was, the students hated it. They resented being made to talk about their experiences and their feelings about their experiences in the way suggested in the book. At their most successful, these exercises produced a lifeless pseudo-compliance . One or two students, mostly mature ones, responded well. Who knows, perhaps it planted a few seeds which will later bear fruit. But overwhelmingly, the psychological contract with which most of them bargained was “we’ll do a bit of this stuff (your stuff) if you then give us a set of fail-proof techniques to pass an essay or get organised”- or whatever. Gibbs was right: significant learning involves a degree of disorientation and personal threat. This was one of the major reasons why they failed to meaningfully take up the opportunities he and others from a more humanist perspective suggested.
2. Primitive Mental States and the Desire to Not Know.
My experience has been that there are serious deficiencies in the models outlined above. Either they fail to fully acknowledge the messiness and confusion engendered by learning or they fail to explain the sheer hatred which exists towards complex and difficult educational material. My interest in this section today is what happens when the going gets tough, what happens when students encounter material which taxes their powers of understanding - moral, emotional or intellectual (though I’m not sure its helpful to make these distinctions). Bion’s 1962 and 1967 papers on thinking form the basis for my explorations here.
What is at issue here is resistance in the old-fashioned psychoanalytic sense. Mainstream theories about both learning emotional life in organisations fail to take account of the very deep and intractable resistances to learning which come from earliest mental life. In this respect they seriously underestimate the power of unconscious processes in explaining educational failure. The starting point is post-Kleinian ideas about the Death Instinct, notably the idea that within the life of the mind (or for that matter the group) there are destructive and reactionary forces which operate against life, against knowing and against the capacity to generate meaning.
The K link
Freud calls the desire for knowledge an instinct, though he is careful to add it is not an instinct proper. Bion’s concept of K identifies knowledge (along with love and hate) as fundamental human links. By K he means not cognitive thinking but the attempts a person makes to come to know his mind - or that of another. This kind of thinking is an emotional experience. To put it another way, knowing and being are one and the same. By K he means the process of coming to know, of trying to experience experience. He identifies two variations of K, both of which are catastrophic for mental life. In no K, or the absence of K, there is a psychotic state of mind. Both thoughts and the apparatus to think them have broken down. The individual dominated by no-K has no containing mind with which to be able to come to know self or other and lives in a schizophrenic or unreal universe where there are no meaningful links, only bizarre objects. The phenomena of -K though is the one with most explanatory power when considering the failure to learn.
By -K Bion means a state which might be called anti-understanding or a determination not to experience anything. “In -K knowledge of painful internal and external reality is evaded: there is a need to be rid of emotional complications” (Bion, 1962 p11). What are the origins of -K? For Bion the tragedy of stunted mental growth originates in the refusal or inability to experience frustration or mental pain. Whether through a preponderance of envy or an unsatisfactory relationship with a containing object (maternal or institutional) the subject is unable to contain emotional pain. There is a need to evacuate the contents of the mind, to be mindless rather than mindful. So, when the capacity to tolerate frustration is low in the human subject - be this infant, patient or student - then: “thinking is confused with ridding the mind of painful bad objects and evacuation predominates over thoughtfulness and creativity”.
Varieties of -K: 1. The Exaltation of Meaninglessness
When -K dominates, all meaningful attempts to learn are attacked
The main conscious experience of learning would be one of futility and meaninglessness. For the teacher, the learner is both parasitic, attempting to extract without emotional effort just enough to get by and arrogant, “what is there to be known that I don’t already know about?”. Not knowing and understanding is exalted as superior to knowing. In a state of -K the patient, or in this case the learner, sees understanding as a depletion aimed at a reduction of his or her own worth. It is worth quoting Bion at length on the differences between K and - K:
This description of students’ response to the new idea will be familiar to most teachers. The new idea is rejected and hated and the group hold mindlessness and not knowing to be superior to knowing. There is an absence of curiosity. An amusing example of this is cited by David Armstrong (1991) in the little girl, asked to write a review of a book about penguins who simply wrote “this book tells me more about penguins that I want to know”. In Bion’s terms this represents a “disorder of the impulse to be curious on which all learning depends” (1967 p106).
There are links to be made here to the idea of the Internal Establishment (Steiner 1993, Rosenfeld 1987) although in this context I prefer the term first coined by Fairbairn in 1947, the Internal Saboteur. (Though note, this term is plucked from the very particular meaning Fairbairn gives in his description of the endopsychic structure). Minus K can be personified as an internal saboteur, a destructive internal agency which feeds off the envious destruction of meaning and effort and which prefers not knowing - with all its certainties and lack of emotional engagement - to knowing. Here too, as in the notion of the internal establishment, is an idealisation of the not knowing , a hatred of complexity and a hatred of development.
2. The Quick Fix
Another way of coping with intolerable and uncertainty and frustration, again one which will be familiar to teachers, is the substitution of knowledge for accumulated facts. The surface approach which replaces coming to know with the accumulation of deadened, desiccated, concrete knowledge objects (facts) is all too familiar. I have observed this myself in S04 (Methods of Social Enquiry)in watching students literally eviscerate within a five minutes a learning task which should have taken up to an hour and which mobilised their efficiency at the expense of their thoughtfulness. This brings to mind Freud’s observation that the instinct for knowledge can take the place of sadism ie in the sense of being a sublimated offshoot of the desire for mastery. In this case however, the desire was for mastery and completion at the expense of the desire for knowledge.
The anxieties aroused by complex or unfamiliar materials - in this case to think about the assumptions behind measurement - make the learner grasp for quick solutions and answers. What should be the space to think is colonised by facts. Behind this failure to engage with ideas is an angry, omnipotent response to difficulty which seeks a compensatory mastery in rigid systems to control and dominate complexities. Behind such a learner there lurks a dread of not knowing . Such students are in the grip of a tyrannical inner organisation - sometimes projected onto staff - which demands the facts for “safety”(Bell 1990). This can be easily demonstrated by a cursory examination of students’ beliefs about what is required in exams.
The inevitability of frustration
Learning inevitably means, at some point, lack of success. It means a brush with uncertainty, frustration and disappointment. As Salzberger-Wittenberg puts it: “We avoid having to struggle with uncertainty, yearn for simple answers, become angry when frustrated and easily give up the struggle” (1983 p54) Yet tolerance of pain is a pre-condition of the ability to think. One needs to be able to tolerate the frustration of not knowing, to think of lack of understanding as useful and to retain one’s curiosity in order for there to be any kind of mental development. In Keats’ by now famous phrase it is about the capacity to bear uncertainties and doubts without irritable reaching after fact and reason. Another way of putting it perhaps is that we need to have some hope.
Minus-K is a normal response to difficulty but it can be activated to pathological levels in some circumstances. The question is which circumstances? Learning in some academic subjects seems to mobilise the -K response to an unmanageable degree. Where there are abstract ideas, complex inter-relationships and epistemological pluralism there will be -K . In terms of this particular undergraduate degree the one of the most obvious locations is these features is the Social Theory courses S01, S05) currently mandatory for all single honours students. Students who have been able to manage so far with a surface or reconstructive approach find that they are faced with a relativistic and abstract subject. Concrete approaches will no longer work or will no longer work as well. Those who approach their work with habitual obedient purposelessness (Gorden 1990) which has served them so far (Perry 1959) find that this strategy is painfully and shamefully exposed. In a very real sense there follows a cancellation of real relations between the learner and what is to be learned and between student and staff. This cancellation masked by a “futile continuance” of attending lectures and preparing for exams.
In a certain kind of way then, the problem is not that students don’t learn, its that they do: what they learn all too well is a calculative strategy which allows them to avoid particular kinds of emotional experience and to work out how much risk to take, how little work to do, how to get by with a minimum of discomfort, internal and external. Other courses too will activate -K. In course with smaller numbers of students there is more of a chance of it being mitigated by the presence of a containing relationship. This fact alone might explain the spectacular failure rates (averaging 30%) of this second year course.
“How shall I learn, except from my friend?”
Though currently very unfashionable in a climate of “independent learning”, the sentiment that learning takes place in a relationship is a crucial one. For Bion the notions of container and contained are primarily internal ones. The personality is made up of these 2 components and so too are thoughts. There must be a part of the mind which can contain feelings and hold thoughts. “The container of the new idea has to be able to accept it without being overwhelmed by it and yet not compress its meaning or deform it by turning it into a cult” (Bell, 1990, p81). The containing mind must not be too rigid or it will constrict and flatten the new idea. Anyone who has had repeated experience of their distress being understood, detoxified and “fed back” in a palatable way will be more able to tolerate and contain emotional experiences without being overwhelmed, will be capable of new mental growth. And of course, the obverse is true.
Although Bion sees the idea of the container as only having a referent in the mind, it does not seem to me illegitimate to think of the teaching relationship as a containing one. The emotional task of the teacher is to contain anxiety at the points of stress, to be available to experience the mental pain of the learner (Salzberger-Wittenberg 1983). Facing up to strong emotional experience means trying to handle things you cannot “think” about. For this to happen in psychoanalysis there has to be another, there has to be someone receiving the anguish and feeding it back in a detoxified or tolerable form. The same is true in Higher Education. So the question is, to what extent do current patterns of course delivery allow for the development of a learning relationship which can detoxify the anxieties engendered by learning? In other words, is there sufficient contact? Is it regular and reliable enough? Is there an awareness amongst staff of the emotional aspects of teaching and learning? These issues are of course empirical ones and beyond the scope of this paper. But one does not have to look far to see that frightening and unmanageable academic material, coupled with fortnightly seminars and large class size militates against a containing releationship.
My thinking, some of which is based on the data below, has led me to believe that students without a strong -K capacity experience certain modules within their course not merely as uncontaining, but as toxic anti-containers. This phantasised relationship is both internal and external. In my interviews I saw students respond to the absence of containment with frantic attempts to provide it for themselves via rote learning of definitions and whole essays whilst all the time despairing at their own strategy’s lack of success and meaning. So, where there is already only a surface approach to learning and where there troubling academic material there will be a problem. Add to this the inadequate containment / relationship and instead of “a climate conducive to mental health” there is a catastrophic breakdown in the ability to make meaning. When the going gets tough, the weak get weaker.
All of the strategies discussed above are displayed in varying degrees and combinations in the material presented below which represents as cross section from a series of interviews conducted with undergraduates who had done badly in S01 in their second year, but who had nevertheless proceeded to year 3. What is common in the range of this material is the inability to make links and meaning from complex material and behind this a hatred of it “being hard”, a hatred of learning which pushes the students to the his or her intellectual and emotional boundaries. Students’ reactions to this frustration are diverse ranging from “not caring” through to frantic attempts to turn leaning into an empty and desiccated set of facts and/or to panic and despair at their failure to come to know.
3. Interviews with the “at risk”
What follows are a selection of narratives based on interviews with students. I have constructed narratives using their own words to show their attempts to (not) learn. What these narratives show are the anxieties activated by learning on a second year social theory course and the strategies mobilised to deal with them. It should also be possible to see in them evidence for the primitive mental processes described earlier. Each of these students display in their own way a hatred of learning.
CLINICAL MATERIAL OMITTED
Implications
The implications of this paper for out thinking about teaching and learning are, I believe, as follows:
1. That we need to take seriously the idea that there is an active hatred of learning amongst students. Students failure to learn is not always or not fully “our fault”. We must take seriously the idea that alongside the (sometimes desperate) desire to learn there is a part of the students’ emotional life at work which desires the opposite: not to be disturbed by new thoughts and ideas, not to have to struggle with uncertainty and being at the edge of the unknown. It almost goes without saying that these struggles are universal and apply as much to staff as to students.
2. There are real limits to the extent to which we as staff can affect these processes. Amongst those responsible for course delivery it is something of a consolatory fantasy to believe that different strategies like better handbooks, or more library resources can work against the sheer hatred of learning that exists amongst large sections of our undergraduate population. This is not to say these things make no difference but it is to say they do not address the emotional components of (not) learning. I would suggest it is our powerlessness in the face of hatred of learning which promotes the fantasy and rhetoric of controllable and rational leaning (incidentally the same fantasy which is implicit in all the study skills literature).
When I delivered this paper to colleagues last academic year there was a very powerful wish to believe that the factors which make students not learn are (potentially) within our control and that we are in large measure responsible. Perhaps we are, but not (or not only) through the manipulation of rationally managed strategies.
3. One thing that is within our grasp is the teaching relationship. Whatever the straitened circumstances in which course must be delivered (fortnightly seminars, large seminar groups) the experience of relationship can make thinkable what was previously unthinkable. It can soften and make palatable difficult intellectual and emotional learning experience. The weakness of the teaching relationship is evident in all the case material presented. Students experience not containment, but rather anti-containment and their ability to metabolise learning, and especially the learning of difficult material catastrophically breaks down. As far as the behaviour of staff are concerned utmost reliability (punctuality, attendance) and sensitivity to the emotional factors entailed in learning become key issues. As Salzberger-Wittenberg says:
This much, most of us already know. The cognitive and humanistic language of educational psychology needs to be supplemented with a bringing into awareness some familiarity with unconscious processes inherent in (not) learning. These are issues for all staff, but especially for those who find themselves continually frustrated and disappointed by their students’ failure to learn. It remains to be seen to what extent engaging in this task will mobilise institutional resistances to learning.
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