California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: January 28, 2000
Faculty on the Site.

Sources:

Lear, Jonathan. Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Harvard University Press. 1998. My copy is the Fifth Printing. Lear is a philosopher at the University of Chicago. He elaborates in understandable fashion Freud's contribution to the social sciences. Although at times the psychoanalytic jargon is confusing, Lear does a good job of making sense to the non-psychiatrist. In this seminar we will focus on Freud's concept of transference in order to explain Western culture's reliance on what Lear calls "knowingness" and Lear's explanation of our need always to be rational. Our need to know accounts for many rationalizations of behavior which Lear describes as nothing more than "acting out" behavior - a more or less direct expression of feelings that have not been translated into rational action. In this seminar we will focus on how that need to know could be plausibly translated into an acting out transference that is not rationally based, and so is not amenable to rational discussion. We propose that such an explanation provides a plausible accounting for what is referred to as the "lack of academic integrity" on today's college campuses. We will then look at the extent to which we may extrapolate that understanding to a sense of moral and social integrity in today's corporate world.

Topic:

Lear's material on Eros as a drive and acting out once we have positive transference. Cite reference to transference as an attempt to keep the world the way we have known and loved it, to prevent change. Some conservative reaction to the curriculum may thus be "acting out" in an attempt to preserve what we once knew and respected (positive transference - Freud's eros drive). Lear, Open Minded, at p. 156 (Eros and Unknowing).

"Acting out"

Students and teachers struggling to measure learning effectively. Some, trying to preserve the "good old days," want to preserve the "rigor" to which they have positive transference. Others are bewildered by the conflicts between that "rigor" and the demands of the rapidly changing current world, know vaguely that they are experience that "rigor" but not successfully coping with the conflict in time and space (demands on time, for "experience", demands in new world of work, demands of "getting to school on time" - commuter issues, demands on time that could once be given to academic discourse, demands to accomodate ever larger groups in classes.

"Acting out" these felt conflicts is one of the explanations we need to consider for the rise in "cheating." Internet access to materials defined as not acceptable by the academic guardians of integrity make academic integrity a concept difficult to limn. Few students and faculty have critically reviewed our methods of measurement. Hirsch's concept of measuring learning as mastery of a content database has led to far more emphasis on database mastery than is warranted by the information explosion and a much-needed new emphasis on critical thought processes in the use of such databases which can now be readily accessed by computer, and which no longer need be committed to memory. The shift to knowledge of "accessing and evaluating information" as opposed to "acquiring information as one's own" or "owning information" reflects modern Western culture's positive transference to "knowingness" as an ultimate value. But "knowingness" requires finite limitations to the database which must be "acquired" or "owned." The information explosion, plus the postmodern recognition of multiple perspectives with their concurrent value and belief systems, means that such "possession" of information is no longer possible. We must move to a more sophisticated level of accessing information, without trying to possess it. (We are presently exploring the implications of this analysis for academic authority and the ways in which we will need to teach tolerance for the ambiguity of multiple authorities. This has always been a problem, but has come most recently to the fore as major belief systems come into more open clashes with the thought and hegemony of the West. Nag Jeanne to put up analysis of "Defining Black Feminist Thought," Patricia Hill Collins, in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, edited by Linda Nicholson, Routledge, 1997.)

What does this mean to present-day students caught in this conflict between "acquiring" and "critically using" information? They have positive transference to "academic discourse sounding" "answers," and act out their need to produce such answers in order to survive in this fast track world. (Bourdieu on Academic Discourse - up soon) to the extent that this is "acting out" transference, and not rational behavior, they are not able to make rational decisions about its occurrence, or to understand it, either consciously or unconsciously, since it is not rational. (Lear, Open Minded, passim.) Lear claims that such transference "acting out" is beyond the limits of psychoanalysis, and not amenable to talk therapy (on Hans Loewald's contributions to an understanding of Freud and the Eros drive, pp. 148 ff.) If such "acting out" is beyond the limits of talk therapy, since it is available to neither the conscious nor the unconscious, then why would we suppose that we could explain to students why they should not copy those academic words that seem to be a "magic potion" for providing school success? Lear reiterates that explaining transference to the analysand simply does not work (citation will be added), for the acting out behavior is not available to the analysand on a rational level. "Acting out" behavior is non-rational behavior. (Lear)

One plausible explanation of the current "loss of academic integrity" on the part of students is that such behavior, is "acting out" transference to the object of "academic success." We know that transference occurs with objects. It is as an object that the analyst seeks to enter into the idiopolis of the analysand and so alter the obsessive neurosis that prevents the analysand from functioning effectively in "reality." (Lear, citations will be added.) If, within such an individualized and esoteric world as that of psychoanalysis, rational treatment of "acting out" behavior is not available without the elaborate efforts required to allow the analyst to enter into the idiopolis, why should we assume that the far less individualized, less concentrated world of teaching would permit us adequate social bonding to simply rationally discuss the moral prohibitions against "cheating," as though any of us knows precisely what "cheating" is in this new electronic frontier? This is not purely a philosophical issue in which we appeal to family and academy values. This is a changing world in which those values are under attack, in which those of us for whom such behavior is rational have difficulty extrapolating our values to the new electronic frontier, and in which many of our students have no rational basis for making moral decisions in this context, since they are in fact merely "acting out" conflicts which have trickled down to them through the socializing agents of the institutions responsible, family and education.

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