Teaching, Classroom Authority, and the Psychology of Transference

Abstract

As recently reinterpreted by Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Norman Holland, and others, psychoanalysis remains an important influence upon English studies, with much still to teach us regarding the unconscious processes involved in composing and interpreting texts. What, we might also ask, can psychoanalysis teach us about teaching? What if we were to subject the "texts" of our own classroom experience to analysis? We address the relationship of [End Page 75] teaching to psychoanalysis. In combining our perspectives--one of us teaches English literature and rhetorical theory and the other directs a writing center and conducts research in feminist rhetorical theory--we seek to analyze and critique the structures of authority in the traditional college literature classroom by comparing them to the alternative structures of the writing center and the feminist pedagogies of peer inquiry. 1