Freire + Klein (according to Britzman)

"Freire's pedagogy proposes the paradox that, if words call upon anxiety, they may also break open uncanny reality. Klein proposed the opposite: anxiety calls upon object-words. Klein works within the imaginary realm of "unreal reality," or phantasies as presenting the urgency of bodily drives attaching to (lost) objects, prior to words. She begins with two assumptions: birth ushers the infant into its emotional situation and the adult mind has its roots in infancy" (86)Is the emotional situation given at birth or through birth or after birth? I assume Klein means all three without the biological determinism that might follow "at birth" thinking. This reminds me of the rhetorical value of "birth" as an event marker of life in arguments that get categorized as "nature v. nurture" in psychology. That also leads me to the political-ethical questions surrounding "birth" as an event marker for life caught up in "pro-life" and "pro-choice" debates on abortion. Are there ways we can subvert birth's overwhleming meaningfulness in the context of psychoanalysis? Anthropologists often subvert birth by engaging work on socialization with its temporality revolving around socially-negotiated, culturally-mediated "gift" of personhood. (This free association has been brought to you by me.)"[Klein] specifies an emptying out and a taking in with her two positions of anxiety that she thinks of as constituting the mind: the paranoid-schizoid position dedicated to splitting and self-preservation, and the depressive position oirented to care of the self and the other. Klein understood anxiety as "phantasies," or delegates for bodily drives (satiation, frustration, and aggression) that function as a constellation of defenses against fear of annihilation" (91)"Julia Kristeva raised the interminable question in her discussion of Melanie Klein: "Under what conditions are the anxieties that tear us apart amendable to symbolization?" (91-92)"For Freire, dialogue can contain the shock of unexpected replies provided that the educator weans her- or himself from treating knowledge as a possession to dispense. I understand dialogue through the allegory of the pain of weaning, that is, as the capacity to tolerate the frustration of not understanding and of having to lose preordained meaning while questioning the wish to know" (92)"The challenge of education, however, as Freire argues, turns on whether a social bond can be created from the ravages of experience with others: "Pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from this reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation." His method of treating key words as unlocking consciousness to its existential activity for new demands" (94)Do words turn like keys in locks for consciousness? This seems narratively true -- "As soon as she said it, I realized ...," but this seems to be part of the "narration sickness" Freire wants to treat. As a note: I'm jumbling two senses of "narrative" -- the format in which stories get told (or "tale types") and the process by which we tell stories. What I want to examine is whether (Britzman's reading of) Freire assumes "just say these key words and the mind is brought into critical social consciousness" because that seems contradictory to Freire's critique of education as the teacher-knower monologuing to the student-empty vessel. Maybe I'm misreading (Britzman's reading of) Freire?"how, then, without being "a master of thought," and "under what conditions" do we call upon the very thing that tears us apart?" (95)Could this also be Lauren Berlant's cruel optimism -- "call upon the very thing that tears us apart"? How does the language of attachment connect/disconnect with Klein's work?