"My inquiry into the pain of symbolization focuses on the emotional work of losing while coming to know the world of others through the passage of one’s history of attachments to loss of loved and hated objects. I lean on a psychoanalytic reading of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed4 and his callfor a radical humanization to release the hold of oppression with a pedagogical reading of Melanie Klein’s Love, Guilt, and Reparation and her rethinking on the constitutive force field of infantile depression as related to the depressive position and its drive for symbolization and the urge for reparation of self with others. The insistences of Freire’s and Klein’s respective book titles disperse the startles oflove and hate." Pp.84"Mrs. Klein and Freire agree that life itself already proposes the problem of emotional transformation whereby loss, depression, and mourning are elemental, although why this is the case, and indeed what the necessities of loss bring to the transformation of affects, ideation, and the social bond, is far from clear. Together, they make an odd couple and, at first glance, seem only to present the distance between the clinic of psychoanalysis (anti-depression) and the politics of education (anti-oppression). When placed in dialogue, Klein’s terms for the emotional inner world of object relations and Freire’s call for the restoration of interiority create new approaches to the pain of symbolization as our fragile means for apprehending, repairing, and even reconceptualizing the fray, mismatches, and promises of the external world." Pp.85"Untethered thoughts, at least for Klein and her colleague Hanna Segal,18 beginthe bare stirrings of a needed defense against the unknown. Through the psychical mechanism of projective identification, the compulsion to send out parts of our selves into the world is a prelude to, as well as a quality of, transformation. Klein’s model for thinking about projective identification is the child at play who bestows inanimate objects with the frustrations of life. At first as defensive structure, language is treated as physicality. The child is on the verge of another weaning, itself an anxiety situation. If language is not unhinged from the confines of the thing, if the body remains an empire, the self has no means for transforming phantasy into imagination and language play." Pp.90"Freire and Klein developed the claim that putting together a fragmented world includes the self’s deep awareness of what tears it apart along with what we tear apart in the self without knowing why. Their vocabulary, so different intemporality and idiom — for Freire, the struggle for liberation, and for Klein, concern for the internal world — gives pedagogy and psychoanalysis a measure of resignation due, in part, to overdetermination, to the unconscious, to the oscillating paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, to human incompleteness, and to accepting the slow work of symbolizing the after effects of a history of loss agonized by both structurally induced impoverishment and injustice and fear of vulnerability and dependency." Pp.94
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