Born (1998) asks how psychoanalytic methods and theories can be useful for ethnography. Specifically, she looks at how “splitting” and “antidiscourse” are useful on broader scales for understanding social and historical processes. After defining “splitting” and “antidiscourse,” Born presents a coherent argument for using psychoanalytic theories on ethnographic scales.
I learned how the text of every day Anglo interactions is influenced by the psychoanalytic studies of children by Melanie Klein and Anna Freud: "You're being defensive!"; "Do not project on me"; "You are in denial"; "You are being paranoid".
Splitting and Antidiscourse as platforms on which to study society and history. "the idea that processes such as projection and introjection, splitting and fragmentation, occur routinely, if viarably, within institutions at the level of the dynamics of group culture, rather than simply due to the aggregate dynamics of individual members." (Born, 373)."Splitting, then, involves a reductive form of thinking: objects are either all good or all bad.
“They share misery, exclusion, disappearance, anxiety, and those feelings that sway between intractability and inevitability”-exactly, they cannot be escaped and if once one accepts and acknowledges that, things shift “how difficult it is to separate the transit between oppression and depression.
"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?
"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.
Britzman (2017) parallels the work of Freire and Klein, to extend psychoanalysis into the field of pedagogy. “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.
(1) First, why Mrs. Klein?Freire is merely Freire, but Klein has a prefix. I googled the phrase "Mrs. Klein", and a rather unsettling, though, tongue-in-cheek article written in 1992 popped up: 'Melanie Klein? She Shrunk Her Kids', a theatrical review of play based on a difficult period in Klein's life. She has just received news that her son has died. Her daughter arrives on the scene, blaming Klein for her brother's death.
Britzman (2002) thinks through Sedgwick’s work in critical theory with the psychoanalytic writings of Klein. This chapter is all about “theory kindergarten.” Britzman opens her essay by asking, “What are the stakes for theory when the problem of psychological significance can exaggerate or foreclose the fault lines of knowledge?” (122). Because I am still trying to understand exactly what Britzman means by “theory kindergarten,” I have decided to leave relevant quotes that explore this term:
stasis: psychoanalysis's critique of pedagogy comes from "the desire to escape the pedagogical imperative: a desire - whether possible or impossible - to do away with pedagogy altogether" (23)"every true pedagogue is in effect an anti-pedagogue, not just because every pedagogy has historically emerged as a critique of pedagogy" (24)"The trouble, both with the positivistic and with the negativistic misinterpretations of the psychoanalytical critique of pedagogy, is that they refer exclusively to Lacan's or Freud's explicit statements about pedagogy, and thus fail to see the illocutionary for
