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E-Journal of Philosophy of Education:
International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan
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Atsushi SUZUKI (Kyushu University)
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Title: E-Journal of Philosophy of Education: International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Societyof Japan, Vol. 6
Published: 22 November 2021
© 2021 Philosophy of Education Society of Japan
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Contents
The 6th Research Promotion Award Article (2020)‘Beispiel’ as a medium of ‘Bildung’: Günther Buck’s interpretation of Kant

1

Yusuke MORI
Symposium
Psychoanalysis and Education: Freudian Thought as an Educational Theory

A Summary Report of the Symposium on “Psychoanalysis and Education: FreudianThought as an Educational Theory”
19
Natsuki SHIROKANE
Kimihiro SUKAWA
In the Midst of Things: A Freudian Turn to Otherness for Educational Theory
Deborah P. BRITZMAN

27

Education from the Perspective of Psychoanalysis: Based on Heisaku Kosawa’s
Educational Consultations Documented in the Magazine Shogaku Ichinensei (First
Graders)
44
Minako NISHI
Beyond the Trauma Principle in Education: Does Freud’s Concept ofNachträglichkeit Imply the Possibility of Retroactive Education?
Akira GESHI

56

Acceptance of “Otherness”: The Uncanny, Helplessness, and the Unpredictable 76
Tadashi NISHIHIRAE-Journal of Philosophy of Education:
International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 6, 2021

‘Beispiel’ as a Medium of ‘Bildung’:Günther Buck’s Interpretation of Kant
Yusuke MORIOpenDNA Research Labs Researcher
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to clarify the contents of Günther Buck’s ‘Bildung’ theory, with respect
to his concept of ‘Beispiel’ and his interpretation of Kant’s theory. In this paper, I present Buck’s
Beispiel’ concept as a medium of ‘Bildung’, the German word for education, and I suggest that
‘Beispiel’ is a mediator between the empirical and ideal worlds, between heteronomy and autonomy,
and between historicity and universality.
As a 20th century German pedagogist and philosopher, Buck was a student of Hans-Georg
Gadamer. Early in his studies, Buck passed away, leaving few published works, and his following has
been small. Interest in Buck has recently grown in Germany within pedagogy studies; however, therelationship between Buck and Kant has not yet been investigated.
This paper is organised into three sections. In the first section, I clarify the problem between
historicity and universality by examining Kant’s focus on the universality of morality and comparing
it to Gadamer’s emphasis on historicity. Then, I examine how Buck attempts to resolve this conflict.
In the second section, I investigate his concept of experience. While Buck’s theory of experience isinfluenced by Gadamer, it remains uniquely his own, especially with respect to universality. In thethird section, I establish Buck’s ‘Beispiel’ as a medium for education.
In conclusion, Buck attempts to solve specific pedagogical problems by engaging in the challengeof closing the gap between historicity and universality, and thus illuminates the transition fromheteronomy to autonomy. In Buck’s ‘Bildung’ theory, historicity and universality are united
harmoniously.
Key words
Günther Buck, Gadamer, Kant, Hermeneutics, Bildung

Correspondence:
Yusuke MORI, OpenDNA Research Labs Researcher. Email: ushimado1988＠gmail.com

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Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to elucidate Günther Buck’s (1925–1983) ‘Bildung’
theory in the context of his reception of Kant. I then show how the concept of ‘Beispiel’is a mediating device for the universality and historicity of ‘Bildung’ in Buck’s theory of‘Bildung’.
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) had the first decisive influence on Buck’s
theory of ‘Bildung’. Gadamer was Buck’s mentor and was known as the author of
Wahrheit und Methode. Buck’s theory of ‘Bildung’ is a continuation of Gadamer’s
philosophical hermeneutic position that ‘understanding’ is ‘the way of being itself’(GW2: 440). In that sense, it is legitimate for Pauls, a current leader of ‘Buck Studies’, toidentify Buck’s ‘Bildung’ theory as ‘hermeneutic Bildung’1. By relying on Buck’s theoryof ‘Bildung’, Pauls essentially re-critiques the position that restricts pedagogical research
to the empirical and its spheres, and it attempts to separate the normative aspects frompedagogy as ‘non-disciplinary’. Schenk, in her voluminous book, Praktische Pädagogik
als Paradigma (2017), clearly shares this position2, as she relies on Buck’s vision ofhermeneutical ‘Bildung’ in an ambitious attempt to establish a ‘practical pedagogy’ forcontemporary pedagogy. The significance of Schenk’s study is that it provides a detailed
interpretation that reveals the validity of Buck’s ideas to contemporary discussions bydrawing on his texts, showing their relevance to temporal problems of education, despite
Buck’s having remained the ‘implicitly acknowledged landlord’ of ‘Bildung’ theory3.
The current paper generally agrees with this position while interpreting Buck’s
thought from an alternate perspective. First, I focus on the difference between Buck andGadamer’s relationship, which has traditionally been understood as a continuum.
Although he was not a pedagogue himself, Gadamer’s thought contains several elementsof pedagogical issues, though there were not many previous works on the subject 4 .
1

In his book, Pauls, the leader of ‘Buck Studies’, relies especially on Buck’s work Hermeneutik und Bildung, anddescribes his conception of ‘action hermeneutics’ as a ‘hermeneutic theory of Bildung’ that takes on Gadamer’s
philosophical hermeneutics. cf. Pauls: 2009.
2
Cf. Schenk 2017.
3
Cf. Schenk/Pauls 2014: 9. This collection of essays, edited by Pauls and Schenk, includes contributions from many
German pedagogues, and indicates the high level of interest in Buck. The contents range from intrinsic readings of
key Buck concepts, such as negativity and hermeneutics, to comparisons with Dewey and discussions of theapplicability of Buck’s ideas to sociological methodology. However, ‘Buck Studies’ is still in its infancy, and there
is no solid image of Buck. Thus, it is necessary to continue to follow the research trends in this regard.
4
In Gadamer’s thought, too, the concept of ‘Bildung’ plays a role that cannot be overlooked, as it has an entry in
Wahrheit und Methode. Ozeki’s discussion is more detailed on this point. Grondin also discusses the relationshipbetween Gadamer's thought and education. Both agree on the following points. First, they both see the process ofhuman development as a process of opening one’s own perspective, which occurs through ‘dialogue’ with others.
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ʻBeispiel’ as a Medium of ‘Bildung’3

However, although Buck’s thought is a continuation of Gadamer’s philosophicalhermeneutic, there is a crucial difference between the two. This difference is not a hidden
criticism of Buck’s Gadamer but rather a ‘transformation’ such as philosophicalhermeneutics inevitably undergo when brought into the field of pedagogy. Thistransformation is an inevitable element of pedagogy. First, I focus on the differences
between the Buck and Gadamer, which have not been emphasised in previous studies.
Second, I focus on the relationship between Buck and Kant. To the best of my knowledge,
no previous studies have focused on interpretations of Kant. However, in Buck’s theoryof ‘Bildung’, Kant’s philosophy is so important that it can be considered in tandem withGadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. While Schenk’s work is remarkable for its
intrinsic analysis of Buck’s thought and for raising its contemporary significance, it does
not, by the author’s own admission, do enough to consider the relationship between Buckand the thinkers who had an important influence on him (Schenk 2017: 19). From thesetwo perspectives, the current paper aims to reveal an ideological linkage on which
previous studies have been inadequately focused and, by emphasising the immediateproblems of education, to bring the image of ‘Buck the Thinker’ to light in a different
way than previous studies.
Buck’s intention is neither to overcome Kant with Gadamer nor to criticise Gadamerin his reliance on Kant. Rather, he attempts to actively incorporate both into the context
of Bildung’ theory. Buck attempts to interpret the historicity of philosophicalhermeneutics and the universality beyond the experience of critical philosophy in aconsistent, non-contradictory manner. In so doing, the concept of paradigms plays animportant role as a medium for both. Buck’s concept of paradigms represents the processof the transformation of philosophical hermeneutics and critical philosophy as they meetin the magnetic field of pedagogy. Witnessing this transformation process is a modest
attempt of the current study.
In the following section, I briefly describe the path of this study. In the first section,
I take a pedagogical perspective to clarify the problems of Kant’s critical philosophy andGadamer’s critique of it. As I see it, this problem is related to the ‘aporia of autonomy andheteronomy’, which is important for pedagogy. Then, I depict Buck’s theory of ‘Bildung’as an attempt to mediate the conflict between ‘universality and historicity’ thatcharacterises this conflict between Kant and Gadamer. In the second section, I identify
the issues of ‘experience’ and ‘universality’ as cornerstones in Buck’s theory of ‘Bildung’.
Second, they emphasise the importance of what they call the ‘classical’ in this process. Third, they both characterise
it as ‘humanistic’. Ozeki 2002; Grondin 2012.
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Buck adopts the concept of experience from Gadamer but modifies it significantly tomake it part of his theory of ‘Bildung’. For Buck, experience and universality are
inextricably linked. The role of mediating this experience and universality is given to the
exemplars. Finally, in the third section, I reveal the moral dimension of ‘Beispiel’. This issignificant because the universality of ‘Beispiel’ includes a dimension of ‘universality’
not only in a mere theoretical sense, but also with a moral dimension. This section
clarifies the dimensions by focusing primarily on Buck’s interpretation of Kritik derUrteilskraft. The goal of this paper is to describe the process of ideogenesis in which thehistoricity of philosophical hermeneutics and the universality of critical philosophy
dissolve in Buck and emerge as a bi-directional theory of ‘Bildung’.

1. The Conflict Between Universality and Historicity
1. 1 The Moral Law and the Difficulties of Education
In this section, I first discuss the ‘paradox of freedom and education’ in Kant5. Moral
law is the prescriptive basis for freedom in Kant. For humans to be free and autonomous,they must be willing to obey moral law:
The autonomy of the will is the only principle of all moral laws and the duty tocomply with them. (...) Therefore, the moral law is the very expression of purereason, the autonomy of freedom. This autonomy of liberty is the only formal
condition that brings all ratings in line with the highest practical law. (Kant V: 33)
Universality, according to Kant, is based on moral law. It is the moral law that every
subject must willingly and unconditionally obey, and it is precisely in this respect that
universality is sought.
However, in the study of Kant, there is an attempt to understand this aporia in a consistent manner within theframework of Kant. For example, Tanida argues that Kant’s educational thought is not fully developed in pedagogy,
and that its true value lies in the concept of the ‘establishment of character’ in his theory of religion. Omori, however,argues that pedagogy has inherent value and focuses mainly on the concept of ‘moralisation’, but in so doing, heemphasises the difference between religious and educational theories in contrast to the position of Tanida and others.
Koch, like Buck, focuses on the concept of ‘inheritance’ in his interpretation. However, Koch sees ‘imitation’ andinheritance as disconnected, and autonomy based on custom and freedom as opposed to each other. Hirose has also
conducted an interesting study of Kant’s ‘Natural Geography’ in which he seeks the possibility of reconciling theempirical and the ideal and attempts to discover the possibility of overcoming the aporia of autonomy and otherness
in ‘geography education’, based on this. cf. Tanida 1994; Koch 2003; Omori 2013; Hirose 2017.
5

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However, from a pedagogical point of view, moral law is fraught with substantial
difficulty. If we follow this scheme, education is an operation to make unfree, transdisciplinary beings obey moral law, yet it is the greatest paradox that pedagogy
encounters in Kant. The question that arises is whether autonomy through education ispossible in the first place. In other words, even if it were possible, through education, toachieve autonomy through the actions of others, does it not go beyond the state oftransitivity because it is not caused by the self, but by others?
Kant does not believe that the transition is smooth from the empirical realm(heteronomy) to the ideal realm (autonomy). Rather, this transition is characterised as a‘revolution, a leap’ (Suzuki 2006: 24).
What makes the transition from trans-regulation to autonomy a ‘leapfrogging
revolution’ is that there is a gap that must be bridged between experience and ideology.
If taken to the extreme, this could lead to the negation of education, which is what Kant’s
position in his critical period seems to be approaching. The transition from transitivity toautonomy is not a gradual process of education, but it is instead a spontaneous renewalof the spirit.
Kant’s position is for strict dualistic separation of ideas and phenomena to ensure
the purity of morality. The ‘aporia of autonomy and heteronomy’ can also be understood
to be superimposed on it.
Gadamer critiques this separation of Kant’s experience and ideas. Hence, although
his argument does not directly address education, it contains important pedagogical issues.
1.2 Gadamer’s Criticism of Kant and his Defence of Convention
Gadamer critiques Kant in terms of the ‘historicity’ in which his philosophicalhermeneutics is grounded. Gadamer establishes ‘historicity’ as an omnipresent anddefining concept of existence. In his article, ‘Über die Möglichkeit einer phisosophischen
Ethik’, he attempts a critique of ethics based on Kant’s concept of dualism from thestandpoint of this historicity. Here, Gadamer’s position suggests the possibility of atransition from heteronomy to autonomy being a gradual process that is distinct from a‘leap’ or a ‘revolution’.
First, Gadamer characterises Kant’s ethics as a ‘dialectic of exception’ (GW4: 178)
regarding obligation and tendency. In other words, in Kant, morality is said to exist in the
opposition between ‘duty’, which is based on moral law—an idea—and tendency, which
is rooted in the empirical and sensible and on which duty triumphs.
However, Gadamer considers this to be an ‘exception’ to the rule. According toE-Journal of Philosophy of Education: International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 6, 2021

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Gadamer, duty and propensity are not necessarily in opposition to each other. Rather, it isGadamer’s position that the two are in conflict in exceptional cases and that the selfimposed obligation of propensity via reason does not necessarily arise.
Gadamer argues against Kant’s ‘dialectic of exception’ by arguing for the ethicalimportance of ‘Sitte’ (customary virtues) as mediators between obligation and propensity:
I think there is another avenue worth examining. That is, a moral-philosophicalconsideration that chooses the usual case of customary compliance rather than the
exceptional case of conflict. (GW4: 180)
What Gadamer emphasises here is the rational character that conventions possess. In
Kant, conventions are seen as being opposed to reason because they offer an opportunity
for heteronomy, but Gadamer sees conventions and reason as harmonious.
The interpretation that Gadamer offers here is a critique of Kant’s ethics, which seek
to eliminate the empirical element from morality by contrasting Aristotle with Kant6. The
pedagogical significance of this critique is central to this study. According to Gadamer, torespect duty, one needs to respect convention. It is not a ‘leap’ or a ‘revolution’ that occurs
here. This therefore allows room for pedagogical intervention.
Addressing the issue of education here does not seem to be out of Gadamer’s own
interests. In the postscript to the sixth volume of his German translation of Nicomachean
Ethics, Gadamer writes:
The question that incidentally motivates us from the very beginning is: What is
ethical reflection? What is ethical reflection and how can it simultaneously serve
education? Aristotle’s writings repeatedly return to such questions. (Gadamer 1988:
65)
Gadamer emphasises the relationship between ethics and education, and his criticism ofKant relates to this relationship, in accordance with Aristotle. By following such a scheme,
Gadamer attempts to ensure the possibility of morality prior to reflection. This position isconsistent with Gadamer’s emphasis on the workings of preconceptions in understanding,and it simultaneously suggests the possibility of a transition from heteronomy toautonomy as a gradual process, unlike Kant’s position. Although Gadamer does notdevelop this issue pedagogically, Buck explicitly assumes this position.
6

Cf. Gutschker 2002: 189–254.

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However, even if we disregard the issue of education here, one major question
remains: is there a situation in which the universality of morality, as guaranteed by Kant,
has been recovered in Gadamer in favour of historicity? In other words, has universality
been recovered in historicity, and has it fallen into relativism?
Unfortunately, Gadamer does not provide a clear answer to this question. However,as I see it, Buck attempts to answer it in his theory of ‘Bildung’. This theory is apedagogical answer to Gadamer’s unresolved conflict between universality andhistoricity. From this perspective, the following section serves as a discussion on Buck’s
theory of ‘Bildung’.

2. The Structure and Universality of the Concept of Experience in Buck’s Theoryof ‘Bildung’In this section, I clarify the inner workings of the concept of experience in Buck’s
theory of ‘Bildung’, mainly in relation to universality. The problem discussed above of
the conflict between universality and historicity is an important motif in Buck’s theory of‘Bildung’, and it relates directly to the problem of ‘Beispiel’, which is the subject of thispaper. However, before delving into the issue of ‘Beispiel’, the purpose of this section is
first to clarify the concept of experience, which is a cornerstone of Buck’s theory of‘Bildung’. Buck adopted this concept of experience from Gadamer, but he modified it
considerably. Here, we can see traces of thought generation in which the philosophicalhermeneutics from Gadamer are drawn into pedagogy and reinterpreted through thefigure of the ‘conflict between universality and historicity’.
Buck concentrates on the concept of experience in his book, Lernen und Erfahrung,in which he presents a discursive history of the structure of experience in relation to theconcept of learning by referring to various thinkers.
As I examine above, Buck’s concept of experience receives its template from
Gadamer. More specifically, in Wahrheit und Methode, Buck uniquely incorporates into
his theory of ‘Bildung’ the ‘hermeneutische Erfahrung’ (hermeneutic experience) that
Gadamer describes as ‘occupying a key place’ (GW2: 445) in this major work. Therefore,
I will begin my discussion by exploring Gadamer's interpretive experience and how herecasts it.
In Gadamer’s concept of experience, the occasion of negativity is the first issue that

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is important for the current paper. Relying on Hegel7, Gadamer says the following:
When we say that we have had an experience in a subject, what this means is that
we have not seen things correctly before and now know better how they are. Thus,
the negativity of experience has an inherently productive meaning. Negativity isneither a mere deception to be detected nor a correction in that regard. Rather, it is amore expansive knowledge that will be acquired. (GW1: 359)
Negativity is not only viewed as an opportunity to correct the conventional way ofperceiving things, but it is also taken as an opportunity to make possible the acquisitionof a wider range of knowledge. Hence, negativity is not the end. Negativity also opens
up possibilities for new experiences, as follows:
The truth of experience is always linked to new experience. A person who is said tohave experience is not only made so by experience, but is also open to newexperience. (GW1: 361)
Negativity and openness are two key elements of Gadamer’s interpretive experience.
This includes a critique of the teleological view of experience in which there is a preexisting purpose, and experience arises accordingly. Therefore, although Gadamer relies
on Hegel to elaborate his concept of ‘interpretive experience’, he breaks with Hegel on
the last point. He holds that the perfection of experience lies not in closed knowledge but
in ‘the openness of experience, which is unleashed by experience itself’ (GW1: 361).
Buck’s concept of experience is essentially an inheritance of Gadamer’s interpretive
experience. However, ‘inheritance’ is not merely ‘appropriation’. Rather, it is to use thelanguage of hermeneutics, an ‘application’. Buck’s application of hermeneutic
experience to ‘Bildung’ seems to contain some very important pedagogical implications.
In contrast to Gadamer, who seeks universality in the openness of experience, Buckbrings to the fore the opportunity of universality in experience. Buck’s concept ofexperience as ‘epagogic’ (induction), expressed in the subtitle of the third edition of
Lernen und Erfahrung, points to universality. However, it does not imply a linear path

The following is a detailed study by Grondin on Gadamer’s relationship with Hegel regarding his concept ofexperience. According to Grondin, by relying on Hegel, Gadamer picks up the dimension of the historicity ofexperience and attempts to rescue the concept of experience that has been trivialised into the methods of modern
science. cf. Grondin 1982: 51–58.
7

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9from the individual to the universal as a methodology in modern science8. The hallmark
of Buck’s concept of experience is the seemingly contradictory situation in which theindividual is simultaneously given a universal. That is, Buck does not think of experience
as purely discrete, but rather that for it to be possible, the universal must be given inadvance, even if in an uncertain form:
Rather, we accept the individual in terms of the universal first. We do so even if, indoing so, we do not perceive the universal as clearly universal, and, on the contrary,
we are uncertain about whether it is really universal in the first place9. (Buck 1989:
39)
In other words, for Buck, the universal is not only an objective, but it is also an enabling
condition for experience; thus, ‘to relate to the universal is the essential function ofexperience’ (Buck 1989: 49). However, in Buck, as in Kant’s epistemology of categories,
the universal does not act only as a condition that makes experience possible; theuniversal is also dependent on experience (Buck 1989: 45). They are not unilaterallyinterdependent; rather, they are conditioned by each other.
Thus, experience is not, according to Buck, a process of mastering only the new.
After all, every new and unknown thing is already understood in some way. Such a priori
experience is recognised in Buck, as he emphasises these seemingly contradictoryfeatures of the concept of experience and turns them into the foundational concept of the‘Bildung’ theory. First, he points out the double meaning of experience as follows:
The expression ‘experience’ actually has a double meaning. This means, on the one
hand, an individual experiences and, on the other hand, the experience that takes
place behind this individual experience. (Buck 1989: 51)
To extend this, experience is both the experience of an unknown object and a new way

Yet, in this respect, Buck is not so far apart from Gadamer. As aforementioned, Gadamer’s concept of experience
also resists the trivialisation of scientific method, and he states in the introduction to Wahrheit und Methode that ‘theconcern of this book is to search for the experience of truth beyond the sphere of control of scientific methodology
in the omnipresent places where it is encountered’ (GW1, S. 1). This is consistent with Schenk’s characterisation of
the book’s concept of experience as ‘a non-empirical, natural, every day, pre-disciplinary or extra-disciplinary
experience of methodological and (natural) scientific experience’ (Schenk 2017: 180).
9
Buck illustrates this with an example of a linguistic expression used by children. According to Buck, children refer
to all men as ‘daddy’ and all women as ‘mommy’. From this, they learn that the words ‘dad’ and ‘mom’ do not referto ‘men in general’ or ‘women in general’ but to specific individuals. cf. Buck 1989: 39.
8

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Y. MORIof experiencing a known entity, since ‘every individualised horizon implies a broader andmore ambiguous horizon of universality’ (Buck 1989: 64). In other words, experience is
not just an encounter with new horizons; it is also the process by which the universality
contained therein becomes apparent.
‘Bildung’ can be depicted as a process of experience in which universality is
gradually revealed. What is important in this case, as in Gadamer's, is the ‘negativity ofexperience’. However, Buck emphasises a different point here than Gadamer:
The work of negative experience is that one becomes aware of oneself. What one
becomes aware of are the motivations that have guided one in one’s previous
experiences and of those motivations that have not been questioned. Negative
experiences, therefore, have the character of self-experience, which is first andforemost qualitatively open to new experiences. (Buck 1989: 80)
It is on this opportunity of ‘self-experience’ that Buck places stronger emphasis than does
Gadamer. The self, the subject of experience, can be inferred to be extremely important
to Buck, who took pedagogy as his discipline. Here, Buck follows Gadamer’s scheme ofthought but simultaneously develops his own ideas in a different realm.
This tendency becomes more apparent when Buck uses this concept of experienceas the basis for his discussion of ‘Bildung’, as follows:
Bildung is structured by its own interpretation in two ways. The first is that it
acquires and acquires the practice and meaning of action relations by acting on itself,
and the second is that it takes the form of an interpretation of practice to make theinterpretation premised on it more its own, to make it certain. This makes the actor
self-aware in a reflective way and makes him aware of his own practice. (Buck
1981: 14)
A step forward from ‘self-experience’ that is grounded in experience, or what might becalled ‘self-reflection’, has occurred in ‘Bildung’. In contrast to Gadamer, who follows
the position of subject criticism of Heidegger, Buck again takes the subject-oriented
position. This is only because Buck develops his own thought in pedagogy, which takes
the subject as an essential category rather than philosophically. In this way, we can see atransformation of thought that is inevitable for pedagogy.
While receiving such opportunities as ‘negativity’ and ‘openness’ from Gadamer,
Buck’s concept of experience is reinterpreted in terms of the subject’s ‘self-experience’.
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Furthermore, the concept proceeds to ‘self-reflection’ when the subject becomes‘Bildung’. Buck’s theory of ‘Bildung’ can be characterised as a constant process of thesubject’s self-reflection, within the conditions of historicity and towards universality.
The difference between Gadamer and Buck seems to lie in the difference between
the background philosophy and pedagogy of interest, rather than in the choice of whichof the two is correct. While Gadamer does not necessarily need the category of the subject,
the subject is essential to Buck as a pedagogue. In this sense, he differs from Gadamer in
his emphasis on ‘self-reflection’.
For this self-reflection by experience, the role of ‘Beispiel’ is to serve as a medium
for raising the subject to universality. However, the dimension of universality that
‘Beispiel’ possesses is not limited to the theoretical dimension but also includes a moral
dimension. That is, Beispiel serves to ensure the normality of actions in addition to
mediating the universality of experience. In this process, Kant’s interpretation plays animportant role. In the following section, I will explore Buck’s concept of ‘Beispiel’,
which ensures the universality of experience with a moral dimension, in light of his
Kantian interpretation.

3. Buck’s Interpretation of Kant and the Concept of ‘Beispiel’
Buck discusses ‘Beispiel’ in Lernen und Erfahrung, in which it functions as amediator of universals for individual experience and learning10. Moreover, the universals
that ‘Beispiel’ mediates, according to Buck, are not theoretically or conceptually
exhaustive:
Kant at least acknowledges how important it is that the Beispiel must be understoodin terms of its power to convey universals, which cannot be fully explained
conceptually. At least Kant acknowledges how important it is that we must be
understood from that power which conveys universals and which cannot be fully
explained, in that he gives to the example a special significance for aesthetic
judgment. (Buck 1989: 133)
According to Pauls, a model is an ‘induktion’ that mediates between teaching and learning and makes
understanding possible. In relation to this, Imai focuses on the ‘convincing introduction’ (einführende
Verständigung) in Buck’s thought and acknowledges the argument questioning the conditions that make learning
possible. Although Imai does not directly refer to exemplars here, he states that ‘exemplars are convincing
introductions’ (Buck 1989: 98). cf. Pauls 2010; Imai 2012.
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Here, Buck implies the moral dimension of the universality of ‘Beispiel’. He discusses
this intensively both in the first edition of Lernen und Erfahrung and in Kant’s Lehre von
Exempel, written in the same year. As the two would need to be read as complementary,
so to speak, Buck sought to clarify the moral significance of exemplars that could not be
fully discussed in Lernen und Erfahrung.
Buck, like Gadamer, criticises Kant’s philosophy from a position that emphasises
historicity. However, Buck takes the pedagogically specific perspective of ‘How can achild, who is not capable of rational reflection, reflect on moral law?’ He states:
Kant’s axiom excludes children from the possibility of being truly moral because
they are not capable of reflecting on moral law. This is because children are excluded
from the possibility of listening to moral law and reflecting on it in order to abide
by it. The axiom of Kant’s axiom excludes children from the possibility of being
truly moral. (Buck 1985: 7)
Here, Buck’s discussion of ‘Kant’s axiom’ can be interpreted as a solid dualism ofphenomenon-ideology in the critical period. However, Buck, like Gadamer, attempts toadmit the possibility of approaching morality from the empirical realm of ‘convention’,
which, in Kant’s case, is limited to the realm of transcendental freedom (cf. Buck 1985:
7). As such, the possibility of access to morality is also ensured for children who do not
yet have the capacity to reflect. In other words, the possibility of a transition fromheteronomy to autonomy—one that is distinct from ‘leaping’—is opened here. By
restoring the significance of ‘convention’ from a pedagogical perspective, Buck critiques
Kant’s philosophy from the standpoint of emphasising Gadamer’s historicity while
attempting to protect the ‘pre-reflective’ realm of morality.
However, if it is to be localised in convention rather than in principle, it will remainin the realm of the sensible and empirical and will not break free from the state ofheteronomy. Kant expresses his criticism of this position. ‘Beispiel’ and ‘Exempel’ havelong been an important part of education before Kant11. However, Kant criticises themoral significance of ‘Beispiel’ in the following passage:
If one were to borrow morality from a paradigm, nothing could be worse formorality than this. This is because every exemplar so presented must be judged
11

For more on this, see Buck’s description in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. cf. Buck 1971: 818–823.

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beforehand to be worthy of a fundamental exemplar, or muster, according to theprinciple of morality. And the exemplars do not give us the concept of morality inthe first place. (Kant IV: 408)
Kant does not reject ‘Beispiel’ altogether12; rather, he makes ‘the viability of what the(moral) law commands unquestionable’ (Kant IV: 409) and provides the opportunity for
one to become aware of the moral law. Although there is a subtle difference, the emphasis
in Kant is not on examples, but on awakening oneself to moral law. An example is onlya trigger for this problem. This is clearly stated in Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (cf.
Kant V: 92).
Buck, however, takes the position of reemphasising the moral and educationalsignificance of ‘Beispiel’. It is important to point out here that Buck attempts to do thisby relying on the Kritik der Urteilskraft. Unlike Gadamer, who relied on Aristotle tocriticise Kant, Buck attempts to overcome the problems of Kant’s philosophy byinterpreting Kant intrinsically, and by focusing on the ethical possibilities in thediscussion of aesthetic judgments. In connection with this, Buck reviews ‘Beispiel’ thatwas not given positive meaning in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft and Grundlegung
der Metaphysik der Sitten. The difference between Kant’s and Buck’s positions on
imitation is of particular importance. Kant dismisses imitation as a cause of heteronomy,
while Buck asks whether imitation causes transitivity. Buck states:
To be sure, mere imitation in the sense of copying behaviour is heteronomy, and in
the first place, conforming oneself to currently accepted conventions is not freeobedience to a grounded norm. But is the behavior of a child imitating a model
before he or she knows the principle in any case merely a crude reproduction of thatmodel? (Buck 1967: 180)
In other words, the act of imitating ‘Beispiel’ lies in the possibility of initiating moral
reflection, and it is certainly not a reflective act. In that sense, according to Buck, imitation
is not mere copying but ‘already contains a stage of free succession’ (Buck 1967: 180).
In order to establish that the ‘Beispiel’ of this imitation is not merely individual and
12

Yamaguchi emphasises the significance of ‘Beispiel’ in Kant’s practical philosophy, stating that ‘the deepest
significance of the example in Kant is that it makes possible the ‘comparison of ideas of how things should be’”
(Yamaguchi 2005: 34). Guyer, on whom Yamaguchi also relies, states that ‘the essential role of example in moral
education is to teach that while children are indeed morally free, they must also struggle with human limitations’(Guyer 2012: 133). Both arguments focus on ‘Beispiel’ but differ from Buck’s in that they do not recognise theinherent value of ‘Beispiel’ itself; rather they emphasise it as a trigger for a child’s ‘own’ moral awakening.
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Y. MORI

empirical but is linked to the moral and universal, we need to return to the discussion of
beauty in the Kritik der Urteilskraft. Buck states, referring to Section 59 of the Kritik derUrteilskraft, that
What is important for Kant here (...) is the application of the notion of analogy to
the relationship between beauty and the moral good, that ‘beauty is a symbol ofmorality’. (Buck 1989: 118)In Kritik der Urteilskraft (Section 59), beauty is positioned as a symbol of morality.
That is, beauty is empirical, even as it contains an orientation toward morality. Moreover,the current study significantly notes that Kant’s statement that ‘hobbies make possible thetransition from sensible stimulation to habitual moral concern without a forced leap, so
to speak’ (Kant V: 354) suggests the possibility of a transition from experience to ideas
without a leap.
For Kant subjective universality is what underpins the universality of beauty.
Subjective universality is said to have a basis in subjectivity, as opposed to moral law.
However, this simultaneously ‘entails a demand on all others’ (Kant V: 353). Kant
introduces this peculiar concept of subjective universality in the Kritik der Urteilskraft toground the universality of beauty, which is different from morality.
However, Buck sees the ethical potential of this subjective universality and explains
it concretely through the concept of exemplars, as follows:
To be sure, no empirical exemplar can determine with certainty whether or not an
action has been done because of (moral) law. But ‘if it cannot be disproved’, it is‘fair’ to assume the sincerity of sentiment. (...) ‘Encouragement’ by Beispiel is basedon trust in the sentiments of others, and the behavior of others again becomes anexample. (Buck 1967: 177-178)‘Beispiel’ certainly does not constitute moral law but provides a ‘direction’ to moral law.
Thus, ‘Beispiel’ and ‘Exempel’ are manifestations of this direction, if not of moral law
itself, and in that sense they deserve to be called ‘exemplars’. They do not have ‘objective
universality’, yet they do have ‘subjective universality’ in the sense that those who receive‘Beispiel’ can approve of them. As shown in the above quotation, the logic used here
clearly has more affinity with the Kritik der Urteilskraft than with the Kritik der
praktischen Vernunft, despite the fact that it is concerned with morality. That is, Buck
attempts to apply Kant’s concept of subjective universality for aesthetic judgement in the
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realm of morality. Certainly, at this point, reflection on moral law has not yet arisen.
However, this raises the possibility that it will do so. Buck believes that this would allow
him to avoid the ‘aporia of autonomy and heteronomy’.
‘Beispiel’ is equipped with the passage to moral law. That is, ‘Beispiel’, which is
supported by subjective universality, contains both empirical and ideological elements
simultaneously. The relationship between ‘Beispiel’ and moral law can be superimposedon the relationship between ‘Idee’ and ‘ideals’ in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Section 17),
as follows:
Idee essentially mean the concept of reason, and ideals mean individual
representations that are suited to ideals. (Kant V: 232)
In contrast to Idee, which is a transcendental rational concept, ideals contain Idee and areat the same time individual representations. That is, the moral law and ‘Beispiel’correspond to ideals and ideals, respectively.
From the perspective of a pedagogue such as Buck, an ‘ideal’ is needed for thisethical realm. Here, then, lies the question of how to awaken a child, an entity not yet
knowing the proper use of reason, into realising that direction. The concept of ‘Beispiel’
was introduced for this purpose. ‘Beispiel’ is rooted not only in the realm oftranscendental freedom but also in the realm of historical experience. For Buck, historical‘Beispiel’ is positioned as a mediator of experience and the Idee that allows for thetransition from heteronomy to autonomy.

Conclusion
This paper takes the conflict between universality in Kant and historicity in
Gadamer as its starting point, and it explores Buck’s attempt to mediate it in his theory of‘Bildung’. It can be concluded that the problem has been brought into pedagogy, andthrough the deepening of the notion of ‘experience’ and the reinstatement of the notionof ‘example’, it has led to the solution of the special pedagogical problem of autonomy
and heteronomy aporia.
Although I have focused on Buck in this paper, the ‘consistent mediation ofhistoricity and universality’ seems to be a challenge for the post-Gadamer generation in

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Y. MORI

general, not solely for Buck 13 . However, I refrained from investigating this wider
perspective in detail due to space limitations. This paper confirms the argument that Bucktakes a more historically based approach than does Gadamer, consolidating it as a basic
pedagogical theory by emphasising the opportunity of ‘self-experience’ within theconcept of ‘experience’. Furthermore, by accepting Kant in his unique way through theconcept of ‘Beispiel’, Buck has attempted to avoid the label of ‘historical relativism’,answering the question of normativity and universality, which are essential to the conceptof ‘Bildung’.
This paper argues that Buck’s perspective views the transition from heteronomy toautonomy as a ‘gradual process’ rather than as a ‘leap to the point of revolution’. Thismeans that he does not take a strict phenomenon-ideology view of dualism, as Kant does.
However, this does not mean that Buck attempts to take a monolithic view of
everything. Gadamer’s overemphasis on historicity—even if unintentional—risks falling
into ‘historical relativism’ that recovers all things into it. To be sure, not everything
escapes historicity, as Gadamer says. Nevertheless, this does not indicate a kind of nihilist
worldview in which there is no universality and no distinction between autonomy andheteronomy. As a pedagogue, Buck must avoid the possibility of nihilism caused byhistorical relativism, the equivalence of all values. Through the concept of ‘Beispiel’,
Buck seeks to mediate both universality and historicity without falling into historical
relativism and dualism, forces which could make education impossible.

References
Buck, G. (1967), Kant’s Lehre von Exempel. In: Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 11, pp.
148–183.
————(1971), Art. Beispiel, Exempel, Exemplarisch. In: J. Ritter and Others (ed.),Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 1 Basel/Stuttgart, pp. 818–823.
————(1981), Hermeneutik und Bildung, Elemente einer verstehenden
Bildungstheorie, München.
————(1985), Herbarts Grundlegung der Pädagogik, Heidelberg.
13

One of the leading thinkers is Manfred Riedel. A disciple of Gadamer, like Buck, Riedel’s interpretation of Kant
explores the possibilities of Kant’s philosophy of history. Like Buck, he focuses on the arguments in the Kritik derUrteilskraft, but his focus is on the argument of teleological judgement. He refers to the distinction between ‘final
purpose’ and ‘ultimate purpose’ in Section 83 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft and interprets the former as ‘culture’ andthe latter as ‘moral law’. Here again, as in Buck, we see the ‘idea of medium’, which emphasises both empirical andideological elements. cf. Riedel 1978.
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17————(1989), Lernen und Erfahrung—Epagogik. Zum Begriff derdidaktischen Induktion, Herausgegeben und mit einem Vorwort versehen von Ernst
Vollrath, Darmstadt.
Gadamer, H.–G. (1990–1995), Gesammerte Werke in 10 Bänden, Tübingen (Quotations
from Gadamer's Collected Works are abbreviated as GW to indicate the volume andpage number).
———— (1988), Nachwort: Die Begründung der praktischen Philosophie. In:
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am Main, pp. 61–67.
Grondin, J. (1982), Heremeneutische Wahrheit? Zum Wahrheitsbegriff Hans-Georg
Gadamers, Königstein.
———— (2012), Gadamer’s Experience and Theory of Education: Learning that
Other May Be Right. In: P. Fairfield (ed.), Education, Dialog, Hermeneutics,
London/New York, pp. 1–18.
Gutschker, T. (2002) Aristotelische Diskurse. Aristoteles in der Politischen Philosophie
des 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart/Weimar.
Guyer, P. (2012), Examples of Moral Possibility. Moral Possibility. In: K. Roth/C. W.
Surprenant (eds.), Kant and Education: Interpretations and Commentary, New
York, pp. 124–138.
Hirose, Y. (2017), Kanto no Sekaishiminteki Chiri Kyoiku: Ningenkeiseironteki Igi
no Kaimei (Kant’s World Citizenship Geographical Education: Elucidating the
Significance of Human Development Theory), Minerva Shobo.
Imai, Y. (2012), Hyosho to Medeia: Kyoikugakutekimedeiaron notameno
Ichikosatsu (Representation and Media: A Study for Pedagogical Media Theory).
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der Wissenschaften, Berlin/Leibzig (Quotes from Kant are taken from the Academy’s
edition of the complete works and indicate the volume and page numbers).
Koch, L. (2003), Kants ethische Didaktik, Würzburg.
Omori, I. (2013), ‘Kanto Kyoikuron niokeru Dotokuka to sono Shatei: Riseino Kaika to Sekaishiminkyoiku no Kankei’ (The Meaning and Scope of‘Moralisation in Kant’s Theory of Education: The Relationship between ‘Openingof Reason’ and ‘World Citizenship Education’), Kyoikutetsugakukenkyu, No. 107,
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Ozeki, T. (2002), Taiwatoshiteno Kyoyo ni kansuru Ichikosatsu: H. G.
Gadama no Keimoshugihihan to Jinbunshugiteki Dento no Saikento o chushinni (AStudy of the Liberal Arts as a Dialogue, with Special Reference to H.–G Gadamer’s
Critique of the Enlightenment and a Re-examination of the Humanistic Tradition),
Kyoikutetsugakukenkyu, No. 86, pp. 1–16.
Pauls, T. (2009), Bildung und Praxis. Studien zur hermeneutischen Bildungstheorie
Günther Bucks, Würzburg.
————(2010), Praxis als Situiertheit. Zu Günther Buck’s hermeneutischer Theorie
des Beispiels. In: Brinkmann, M. (ed.), Erziehung. Phänomenologische
Perspektiven, Würzburg, pp. 39–54.
Riedel, M. (1978), Geschichtsphilosophie als kritische Geschichtsdeutung. Kant’s
Theorie der historischen Erkenntnis in Verstehen oder Erklären? Zur Theorie undGeschichte der hermeneutischen Wissenschaften, Stuttgart, pp. 189–216.
Schenk, S./Pauls, T. (2014) (ed.), Aus Erfahrung lernen. Anschlüsse an Günther Buck,
München.
Schenk, S. (2017), Praktische Pädagogik als Paradigma. Eine systematische
Werklektüre der Schriften Günther Bucks, Paderborn.
Suzuki, S. (2006), Imanyueru Kanto no Soretsu: Kyoikutekimanazashinokanatae(Immanuel Kant’s Funeral Procession: Beyond the Educational Gaze), Shunjusha.
Tanida, S. (1994), Kanto no Kyoikugakutekidosatsu: sono Haikei Naiyo
Igi (Kant’s pedagogical insights: Their background, content, and significance). In:
Shakaitetsugaku no Ryoya, edited by Kanto Kenkyukai, Koyo Shobo, pp. 135–164.
Yamaguchi, T. (2015), Dotokukyoiku ha donoyoni/dokomadekanoka:
Kantokyoikugaku no Akuchuaritei (How and to what extent is moral education
possible: the actuality of Kant’s theory of education). In: Sasada, S (ed.),Kyoikutekishiko no Ayumi, Nakanishiya Shuppan, pp. 19–36.

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A Summary Report of the Symposium on “Psychoanalysis andEducation: Freudian Thought as an Educational Theory”

Natsuki SHIROKANE
Kwansei Gakuin University
Kimihiro SUKAWA
Shiraume Gakuen University

1. Symposium’s Implementation Status for This YearFirst, due to the global situation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 63rd
Annual Meeting was shifted to an online format for the first time in the history of thePhilosophy of Education Society of Japan (PESJ). This step was taken to avoid gatheringsat the host university, Nihon University, College of Humanities and Sciences. The inperson symposium was replaced by manuscripts posted on the Collection of Presentation
Manuscripts, which, in turn, were sent to the conference participants. Questions from theparticipants were accepted online on October 17th and 18th, the dates of the conference.
Four members—three reporters and a designated debater—exchanged comments,
questions, and replies through e-mail. The contents were sent online at a later date, alongwith replies to the participants’ questions. We would like to express our gratitude to Prof.
Akira Geshi, who worked as the planner, reporter, and organizer of the symposium; Prof.
Deborah P. Britzman, who worked as the reporter and who was unfortunately unable tocome to Japan; and Prof. Takeru Mashino and the members of the Conference
Preparation Committee for their great effort in providing a liaison and coordination
between the members of the symposium. We would like to sincerely thank them for theirefforts.

Correspondence:
Natsuki SHIROKANE, Kwansei Gakuin University. Email: natsuki＠kwansei.ac.jp
Kimihiro SUKAWA, Shiraume Gakuen University. Email: sukawa＠shiraume.ac.jp

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N. SHIROKANE & K. SUKAWA

2. The Purpose of the Symposium
The purpose of the symposium is as follows:Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis is one of many major movements that have shaped
the academic world since the 20th century. Although its scientific and therapeutic
credibility is sometimes called into question, the idea of psychoanalysis has become
part of our paradigm and lifestyle. One cannot think of modern philosophies andideas without considering Freud’s influence. Education is no exception.
Understanding children using depth psychology, beginning with psychoanalysis, isdeeply ingrained in modern educational discourse and practices. Nonetheless,educational studies have rarely considered Freud and his psychoanalysis as a central
research topic. Pedagogists have argued that psychoanalysis has only had a partial
impact on education. This underestimation may be regarded as resistance topsychoanalysis in education. Education that holds a romantic view of children—for
example, that they are born good—is an idea that is incompatible with Freud’s
theory of infantile sexuality. Moreover, we may argue that Freud’s philosophy
radically differs from Japan’s postwar education, which sought to envision apeaceful future by reflecting on the war with regret. In contrast, Freud espoused thepessimistic idea that war cannot be eradicated because it is ingrained in humannature. These conflicting views are founded on opposing perceptions regardingchildhood, such that while education looks at the future of children, psychoanalysis
looks back at the cause of pathology in early childhood. As such, there have been
few meeting points between these two positions. Considering the above, we would
like to re-examine the relationship between psychoanalysis and education andattempt to argue that Freudian thought has a place within educational theory, as wellas in this symposium.
The reporters were as follows: Prof. Deborah P. Britzman (FRSC/York University),a leading researcher in theoretical and practical research on psychoanalysis andeducation; Prof. Minako Nishi (Kyoto University), a psychoanalyst who is also known
for her study on the history of psychoanalysis in Japan; and Prof. Akira Geshi (Nihon
University), the organizer of this symposium. They were joined by Prof. Tadashi
Nishihira (Kyoto University), a designated debater.

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3. Summary of the Symposium
We had a profound discussion because the comments, questions, and replies among
the four debaters, the queries from the general members, and the reporters’ replies were
all conducted in writing. Please refer to the Collection of Presentation Manuscripts forthe summary of each report. Here, we would like to summarize the discussion (thesections inside quotation marks were quoted from “Collection of Questions, Comments,
and Replies”).
(1) Comments and questions for the Britzman Report and their corresponding
repliesProf. Nishihira first focused on the connotation of “otherness,” as suggested by Prof.
Britzman. It is something “mysterious, uncanny, and unknowable”; “we cannot control
it, but [it is] definitively essential in the current situation.” Prof. Nishihira supported Prof.
Britzman’s theme that teachers should stand with the students while acknowledging theirown and the students’ otherness, and that such an acknowledgement encourages mutual
growth. While supporting this idea, Prof. Nishihira also asked whether this theme could
be connected with the trust in otherness and whether the Eastern philosophy involving
the affirmative and constructive role of non-articulation could be explored. Prof. Nishi
asked about the connection between learning and otherness, perceived as something
dynamic that “may not always exist, but may be transient.” She likewise inquired about
the relationship between otherness and libido. Prof. Geshi asked how the “pain ofeducation for otherness” could be tolerated and how it could be conveyed. The general
members asked: 1) whether there is transference specific to education that differs frompsychoanalytic treatment (Mr. Yuho Goto), and 2) Prof. Britzman’s opinion on teachersattempting to escape exhaustion by shutting out their emotions (Prof. Nana Hatano).
Other questions were about Prof. Britzman’s view on the relationship between the theoryof queer pedagogy and psychoanalytic research (Prof. Masato Fukuwaka). They alsoinquired about her motives for becoming interested in psychoanalysis (Prof. Nana
Hatano).
Prof. Britzman provided a comprehensive response to individual questions. The
content of the reply covers her own research history, supplementary explanations, andperspectives for considering the relationship between psychoanalysis and education andthe redefinition of keywords. The following are the topics that we found interesting andsuggestive:
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N. SHIROKANE & K. SUKAWA(ⅰ) Psychoanalysis suggests the approach of “we feel before we know and learn
before we can understand.” Such an approach is different from “we understand and thenlearn,” which is often found in education. This approach understands the emotional
experiences that underlie the relationships with others. It likewise examines “negative
capability” as “tolerance to otherness” (i.e., “not knowing” and “uncertainty”). It can also
be used as a “means for handling one’s countertransference or urgent feelings to act out
and even to destroy contact with an actual other.” (ii) Prof. Britzman stated that “the link
between psychoanalysis and education is both fragile and hopeful.” While
psychoanalytic knowledge echoes fate and is not easily received, it demonstrates theimportance of the teacher’s attention to their own and students’ past mental lives. Throughan understanding of the bodies and eros, it teaches that “the right to have a mind of one’s
own and to freely associate to people and memories can take on importance.” (iii)
Emotional situations in learning can be considered at two levels. The first is the level atwhich teachers recognize the difference between reality and ideals and respond to
unknown situations. The second level is the creation of resources and vocabularies for us
to pay attention to our mental lives. For example, what Prof. Nishihira called “nonarticulation” and Koichi Togashi formulated as “the psychoanalytic zero” can also be
regarded as an expression of the dynamics to know, despite the existence of translationand communication gaps and other uncertainties. (iv) “Anxieties are a significant
experience in education.” A violent child’s game of teacher may be “reaction formations
or defenses against both anxiety and the otherness of learning.” Furthermore, one of thefactors that student teachers blame themselves for not becoming an “ideal” teacher may
lie in the harsh model of classroom teaching that leaves them with the choice to either“sink or swim.” (v) The reply concludes as follows: “I don’t see otherness so much as aself-possession, or as something to teach others. I think of otherness as a situation withothers that has the quality of a nonrelation (…).”(2) Comments and questions for the Nishi Report and their corresponding replies
The general members asked questions around three topics: 1) the Freudian
understanding of human beings (Prof. Keiko Nakano), 2) the fact behind “educational
attitudes” that many analysts try to avoid (Mr. Yuho Goto), and 3) whether transference
takes place through intervening factors such as letters and IT equipment (Prof. Nana
Hatano). According to Prof. Nishi, the point of Freud’s understanding of human beingsis that “he had made it clear that human beings do not know much about themselves.”
Moreover, the “educational attitudes” that analysts warn people about refer to the
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superiority of those who know over those who do not know. This state of affairs leads toidealizing the analyst and, conversely, strengthening their patients’ intellectualization by
providing them with too much advice. Concerning the last question, Prof. Nishi answeredthat she continues to ask herself the following questions amid the COVID-19 pandemic:“will transference occur” and “what has been lost” in the context of clinical practices
where people wear masks?.
Prof. Nishihira’s comment developed from a situation “that cannot be helped” (i.e.,otherness) in which Heisaku Kosawa and Seishi Shimoda had found themselves.
According to Britzman Report, even though teachers do not want a sense of otherness toemerge between them and their students, they have no choice but to manage it andsomehow survive in that situation. On the other hand, analysts attempt to “facilitateclients’ otherness unknowingly” and “experience it together, scrutinize it, and try tosurvive.” As to this difference between psychoanalysis and education, Prof. Nishi argued
that while much of the transference between teachers and students is slowly diffused andeliminated, psychoanalysis (especially Kleinian psychoanalysis) creates and facilitates
the transference to turn the situation into one where they can discuss it. She described thisas a storm in which we work, and we have to throw ourselves into the storm even if wewant to escape from it.
Prof. Geshi asked two questions. The first asks why Japanese psychoanalysis
emphasizes mother–child relationships. The second asks about the validity of educational
consultations conducted through the media (e.g., television and magazine). Regarding theformer, Prof. Nishi explained that she could attribute the emphasis of Japanese
psychoanalysis on mother–child relationships to the development of the object relations
theory in Japan’s postwar psychoanalysis and the reflection of men’s Oedipal complex.
Regarding the latter, she replied that, while educational consultation involves providing
professional advice, psychoanalysis is a special type of communication that goes far
beyond the help that the client in need could imagine.
Prof. Britzman recognized the relationship between the “demonic fate of humannature and education” in Nishi Report. When an analyst says, “Let’s get started,” thephrase sounds heartless to the patient: “There is something that cannot be started because
it already happened. It’s as if the analyst’s words threw the patient back into childhood(…).” With this in mind, Prof. Britzman asked two questions based on the clinicalpractice of psychoanalysis, where a situation will “repeat what cannot be remembered.”
The first question is: “What kind of education and what kind of resistances are we callingon?” The second question is: “In discussing the disparities between advice and life, (…)
how may we understand the urgency of affect carried out as in conflict with our
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N. SHIROKANE & K. SUKAWA

theoretical claims?” In response to the first question, Prof. Nishi answered that
understanding the “educational attitudes” of analysts is an aspect of education andrequires reconsideration. Replying to the second question, she said that ‟a storm of urgent
affections may always be brewing behind our calm world.” As such, it may be ‟theoverwhelming power of the unconscious that cannot be helped by advice.”(3) Comments and questions for the Geshi Report and their corresponding replies
The questions from general members concerned both the criteria for measuring thepositive and negative aspects of “retroactive education” (Prof. Hiroaki Sekine), and theview of education that promotes “retroactive learning” (Prof. Hiroaki Sekine and Mr.
Yuho Goto). Prof. Geshi answered these questions by organizing his replies into threestatements. First, what constitutes an experience that can lead to retroactive learning moreeasily?— It is something beyond our understanding when we experience it, and it settles
like sediment at the bottom of one’s unconscious mind. Second, what kind of secondary
experience activates initial experience?— It requires similarities with the initial
experience, but it is difficult to standardize. Third, what criteria can be used to evaluate
self-transformation?— Generally, there are two criteria; the person himself/herself andthe community to which the person belongs. However, these two factors do not always
agree. Moreover, individuals belong to multiple communities, and therefore, there are
multiple criteria. In addition to these factors above, the criteria are constructed afterwards
and may change.
Prof. Nishihira recognized the logic of eschatology in Nachträglichkeit. This logic
denotes that the meaning of every event in (life) history will be revealed at the end. In
response to Freud, the Britzman and Nishi Reports emphasized the retroactive act of“touching the darkness and digging up the shadowy part” to aid in human development.
Further, Geshi Report considered the retroactive act to suggest a kind of education that“cannot be predicted in advance and can only be confirmed after reflecting on later.”
However, Prof. Nishihira indicated that such a perception may lead to relativism,
skepticism, nihilism, and populism: “There are ‘no foundations,’ ‘no guarantees’ ineducation. In spite of having shared that reality, how much ‘courage to educate’ can wehave? While feeling confused about asking such a question to myself, I cannot help but
think about what is being asked today.” On the other hand, Prof. Geshi admitted that it isa “gamble” whether “retroactive education” will happen. Moreover, he argued that weneed to be vigilant toward “barbarism,” which has lost the perspective of uncertainty: “Itmust be the sensibility that perceives education as something incomprehensible that
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enables teachers to broaden their horizons when they stumble in educational practice andsupport children and people who cannot get used to education.”
Prof. Britzman asked two questions. First, “how can we narrate the significance of
uncertainty in learning?” Second, “how can those who direct education accommodate a
psychical reality in their theories of transmission and reception and thus go beyond thestasis of education as screen memory?” Prof. Geshi replied by redefining the ambiguous
meaning of “retroactive education.” He said that it would enable the learning that
accompanies a philosophical sensibility. This would create educational systems thatdiffered from the present one, which would not be constrained by the desire for“immediate effects.” Second, it would overcome a view of education that tends to arrive
at topics, such as “the content to be communicated” and “better technology.” Lastly, heargued that to have the understanding that “education is accompanied with ‘uncertainty’
could well prepare him/her to effectively address something that is difficult to understandduring his/her future educational practice.”
Prof. Nishi said that “every event associated with the trauma we experience has thepotential to create a meaning.” She suggested the possibility of “education to create
Nachträglichkeit,” which prompts the “symbolization of trauma.” Prof. Nishi argued that“psychoanalysis can learn a lot from education” in regard to “thinking,” which isindispensable for this symbolization. While affirming her argument, Prof. Geshi
acknowledged the need to overcome endless enlightenment and the threat of “Es” with“our own intelligence and the courage to step away from dependence on specialists suchas teachers and analysts.” At the same time, he suggested the need to explore “a way toco-exist with others while keeping a certain amount of dependency on them.”

4. Issues and Prospects
As discussed previously, “otherness” was the keyword in this symposium. In thephilosophy of education, otherness has been discussed in a wide variety of contexts, suchas “inner others,” “children as others,” and “transcendence.” However, the issues ofotherness in this symposium ranged from the emotions between the educator and theeducated to cultural events that are difficult to understand with the individual’s innerstorm of emotions as a starting point.
Psychoanalysis focuses on the emotional storm that suddenly blows up fromindividual unconsciousness. Furthermore, psychoanalysis has theorized otherness andhas dealt with it clinically. Prof. Nishi argues that within psychoanalysis, education can
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N. SHIROKANE & K. SUKAWA

be found both as a cause of the storm and an opportunity to reveal the storm. Prof.
Britzman argued that for education, psychoanalysis stimulates inquiries into the nature ofstorms and ways to deal with them. They are storms within a child, within a teacher, andthose that suddenly blow violently in a place when they face each other. As we can see inthe exchange between Prof. Nishi and Prof. Nishihira, while psychoanalysts throw
themselves into the storms of their patients, the best that a teacher can do is manage theirown and their students’ storms. If we look away from the storms, we will allow theviolence that exists everywhere in society and schools to continue. One of the roles of
education is to pay attention to one’s own storm and that of others, to give appropriate
expressions to them, and to seek ways to relieve them.
Prof. Britzman’s discussion on “otherness” and Prof. Geshi’s discussion on
Nachträglichkeit included various cultural phenomena and cultural heritages, such as theglobal political youth movement, precarious situations involving violence and inequality,
and the contemporary significance of classics. These discussions could be considered as
educational variations of Freud’s criticism of culture. Historical catastrophes, such as
genocides, disasters, and pandemics can be added to these cultural phenomena.
Education that could cause a catastrophe must survive without escaping otherness andNachträglichkeit. If that is the case, how does education carry the weight of surviving acatastrophe, facing the emotional storms of the dead, and supporting those who haveexperienced the catastrophe and those who later speak about it? I think that educational
philosophy is required to show uncompromised hope in the form of constant questioning
without assisting the hasty symbolization or the oblivion of the storm, while staying in its
difficulties and uncertainty. It seems to us that the “Nachträglichkeit of educational
philosophy” was suggested in this year’s symposium, which was held amid thecoronavirus pandemic, and in last year’s symposium entitled “Inheritance of
HIROSHIMA Memory and Emerging Reconciliation.”

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E-Journal of Philosophy of Education:
International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 6, 2021

In the Midst of Things:
A Freudian Turn to Otherness for Educational Theory
Deborah P. BRITZMAN
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
Abstract
A Freudian turn to otherness is introduced to discuss experiences in learning as stepping away fromthe attractions and defenses of certainty, regimentation, omnipotence, and compliance and stepping
toward encountering the relativity of unknown life. I picture life in education as in media res in orderto regard learning as getting to know imperceptible and hardly expressible yet deeply influential
impresses of experiences. Such an approach calls upon a problem and an interest in surrendering to
the excesses of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The interest belongs to receptivity to unknown life.
The problem is that excess involves unknowability not easily claimed as these are situations ofotherness that broadcast human incompleteness, dependency, and uncertainty.
Part one considers a theory of learning through its difficulties, failures, and receptivity. It asks,
how do responses to the unknown affect the fields of education and psychoanalysis? Part two presents
four psychoanalytic entanglements of learning in media res and so, as situation: 1) the emotionalsituation (Bion); 2) the anthropological situation (Laplanche); 3) the transference situation, (Klein);and 4) the ethical situation (Togashi). They propose scenes of otherness as natality, inherited histories,
the limits of language, and primal unspoken wishes for love and fear of breakdown. This view of life
follows from Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as the heart of subjectivity with his
insistence of consciousness as the exception to mental life and human activities. The argument thendevelops a Freudian philosophy of learning to characterize the umwelt of education as affected with
the Kantian thing that can be neither controlled nor known yet can, nonetheless, be the most importantthreshold of existence.
Key words
Freudian thought, otherness, emotional situations, learning, ethics

Correspondence:
Deborah P. BRITZMAN, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Distinguished Research Professor,
York University, Toronto. Email: britzman＠yorku.ca

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Umwelt: An Atmospheric Education
A great deal can happen to our conceptions, hopes, questions, and awareness ofexperience in education if we work within Sigmund Freud’s discovery of otherness as
the heart of learning that issues from his insistence that consciousness is the exception tomental life and human activities. We can become interested in the unconscious in the
midst of things. It appears when least expected, veers from dreams to the dailiness of lossof attention, and is inexplicable in tendencies, variabilities, and entanglements. I
understand these situations as creating a perpetual “umwelt” of education whereby untold
experience is a feature of atmospheric life and is itself in antagonistic with this life
(Jacobson 1964). How all this may be accepted and studied is the heart of my research.
A Freudian turn for education involves a way to think of learning and its myriad
relations to knowledge, others, and objects as stepping away from the attractions anddefenses of certainty, regimentation, omnipotence, and compliance and a step toward
encountering the relativity of unknown life. Education is treated as the steps toward thatwhich is not known in order to regard learning as getting to know imperceptible andhardly expressible yet deeply influential impresses of experiences, all of which call uponan interest in surrendering to the excesses of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Such
excesses, or what is left over from the immediacy of felt encounters, are not easilyclaimed since these situations broadcast human incompleteness, dependency, anduncertainty. Otherness plays along these lines of human incompleteness.
My discussion has two parts. Part one considers difficulties, failures, and response.
I ask how do responses to unknown life affect the fields of psychoanalysis and education?
What kind of education can then be thought? Part two attempts to picture life in education
through four psychoanalytic entanglements that propose learning in media res and so, as
situations. These entanglements are: 1) the emotional situation (Bion); 2) theanthropological situation (Laplanche); 3) the transference situation (Klein); and 4) the
ethical situation (Togashi). I treat them all as relational scenes of otherness and themselves
as enigmatic features of learning. All propose scenes of existence as natality, as inherited
histories, as the limits of language, and as primal unspoken wishes for love and fear of
breakdown. All these forces compose the umwelt of education as affected by a Kantian
thing that can be neither controlled nor known yet can, nonetheless, serve as the mostimportant threshold of existence.

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A Special Charge
Psychoanalytic theory admits into its practices, knowledge, and representations thefluidity of otherness as an unknowable quality of human psychology. Otherness is also
considered as its own method needed to dissolve the façade of certainty and the fixations
to timelessness. Freud’s sudden and disruptive discovery of his own otherness occurs
in the midst of dreams. There, meaning is inexhaustible, inadmissible, objectionable, andinexplicable. For these dimensions of thinking, there are no objective means to measure,depict, predict, or stabilize the causes of either subject or object. Due to a constitutive
uncertainty that permeates understanding, reasons too are affected and can become miredin tautologies, anxiety, defenses, and language games. And while all of this affects
psychoanalysis, it may also be felt as alienating the surface activities of education.
As difficult as it may be to admit, a failure of translation is a quality ofpsychoanalytic work and a condition of its education. The handling of failure is everpresent in clinical discussions, although not from a measure of success or best practices.
The kind of advice on offer is counter- intuitive to professionalization. Freud (1915) urgedmodesty in practice while Lacan (2006) suggested the analyst’s position as dummy.
Winnicott (1996) expected to be mainly wrong in his interpretations to the patient while
Bion (1987) warned that whenever two people meet, there would be bad jobs andemotional storms. Kohut (1982) argued that empathy can only occur when analysts
accept the relativity of knowledge as also affecting their views of development.
McDougall (1992) urged analysts become affected by the limits of their practices withothers. Admissions of failures of translation are deepened by the fact that there is noobjective reality to reach.
What is left is the charge of psychoanalytic vocabulary, used as both mirror andrefractor to unconscious life also made from receptivity, translation, and visitation. The
vocabulary is itself an enactment of situations made from those barely rememberedfeatures of learning that emanate from susceptibility to unknown life. These
psychoanalytic ideas lend a special charge to philosophy’s turn to emotional experiencesince so much of our lifeworld is out of our sight and proceeds without memory, consent,or control. Questions of how the world is registered, felt and perceived as communication
open philosophy to consider the suppleness of inner life as issuing from a place it mustalso comment on.
Responsiveness to the unknown, however, brings with it the weight of reflections
on our practices, limits, resistances, repetitions and failures to learn. And transitions in the
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psychoanalytic field of thought preoccupy such varied contemporary analysts such as
Donna Orange (2020), Togashi Koichi (2020), Julia Kristeva (1991), and Michel Émile
de M’Uzan (2019). Each has taken an ethical turn in their consideration of why the powerof uncertainty and vulnerability in the lifeworld of the mind is related to an acceptance ofotherness and the capacity to stand experience. They draw from philosophical debates,
compelling myths and literary fiction, and from analysis of the cost of humanness,
political divisions, trauma, and psychosomatic incompatibilities. Their ethics stem fromthe priority of the other and all propose the desire to think and be receptive to scenes ofboth suffering and pleasure. They urge us to read and write.

If One Only Knew!
Receptivity to the unknown gives to birth a new sense of temporality, where time isalways passing and must also include its retrospective accounts of experience. Scarfone(2015), for example, considers the antinomy between presence, absence, and meaning.
He observes that gap made from event, situation, and remembering, where ‘a matter oftime’ becomes a dilemma for knowledge and a problem of belief. Freud (1914) identified
disjuncture as a perpetual umwelt of mental life when he drew his analysis of infancy,
childhood, and family into the conundrums of love and hate in education and when,looking back, had to treat his own education as a disturbance of memory.
Receptivity to the unknown would also turn psychoanalytic practices back on itself
and do so with acknowledging the limits and difficulties of learning from the pain ofhuman incompleteness. Here then is the birth of an affected science, touched by theprocedures it names. Its knowledge of subjective life would be subject to an opening
Certeau (1993) described as “jeopardized and wounded by its otherness (the affect, etc.)”(27). It cannot be otherwise since the object of psychoanalysis is a subject that forces,
invents, deceives, loves, worries, interprets, repeats, sleeps, cries, laughs, desires, andretreats. This subject of otherness serves as a specimen of knowledge while becoming thesource of its own inquiry. Laplanche (1999) offers psychoanalytic geometric: “a methodof free association polarized by the transference. . .” (162). Through this entanglement ofspeech and desire, psychoanalysis is emotional because its theory is “not only confronted
with an object” but also remains a method instructed by its situation (83).
Psychoanalytic methods then are in touch with and touched by obstacles to knowing
and may well repeat what memory has fractured and buried. Its methods are particularly
dedicated to the work of getting to know those barely perceptible, influential, affected,
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ignored, and often unaccounted for qualities of experience that could not have been
known at the time of their unfolding. The speculation is that in the midst of learning
something resists its own unveiling. For psychoanalytic views, there are unknown
qualities of psychical life that drive enactments and exchanges of affect and, while rooted
in anxiety and frustration, may also be expressed through displacements and resistance.
The trouble begins with not knowing what experience in learning can feel when meetingwith needing to know, knowing without having to learn, and learning before one canunderstand. For this sequence to sustain its own emotional logic and then to break suchlogic open, there would still have to be feelings of frustration, denial, anxiety, remorse,
guilt, and ordinary resistances to the pain of incompleteness. One cannot ever know one’s
incompleteness. There would then have to emerge from such discord new emotional ties.
We would have to accept that creativity, as well, is located in the midst of such incomplete
things.
Kant’s approach to antimony in thinking is often cited by the fields of
psychoanalysis and critical theory when commenting on the problem of unreachable
reality while being in the midst of it. One of Kant’s (1965) many arguments pictured
human knowledge from two irreducible sources: objects given to perception and thoughts
about them. Kant wrote: “Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without
understanding, no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty andintuition without concepts are blind” (93). What then can exist between a thought andreality? Freud might reply, anxiety.
This difficulty for existence, that is, accepting the difference between perception andthe object and between the source and representation of perception, was a key problem
for Freud. Laurence Kahn (2018) traces the aporia to Freud’s exasperation, “If one only
knew what exists” made after Charcot’s famous claim, “Theory is good, but it doesn’t
keep things from existing” (122). It is not only that theory comes too late. It is also thattheory cannot stop reality. Freud (1900) acknowledged this otherness in his work on
dream interpretation when he admitted that no interpretation can reach the navel of the
dream and when he argued for two realities: psychical and material. In Kahn’s (2018)wise view, while no one can know reality as such, one can, at least, try to understand its
consequences (146). And, trying to understand what has happened is what constitutes our
educational situation.
Wilfred Bion (1993) has written extensively on experience with his focus on theconsequences of having psychical reality while trying to know this. He can be read asworking from the proposition, ‘well, if one only knew what exists with a thought!’ His
answer is surprising. Bion linked the otherness of thoughts and intuition to estranging
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situations that he called “thoughts without a thinker” and “empty thoughts” (91).
Thoughts are prior to their thinking. He proposed three kinds of experiences tied tothoughts that required the containment of an apparatus in order to think. The first kind ofexperience is with the mother who provides containment for the infant’s chaotic thoughts,
screams, and bodily urges. The second kind of experience is created by the mother’s
reverie of returning the chaos back to the infant in a manageable way. It is as if themother’s reverie said, ‘You can relax for there is meaning.’ The infant can then use thatwish to develop an apparatus of thinking, needed to contain the mind in the midst of its
own thoughts. A third kind of experience that the apparatus of ‘thinking’ needs to containthoughts are the relational situations of love, hate, and knowledge. That is, the experienceof thoughts and affects must have a thinker to think them. In Bion’s view, a thinker would
have to be willing to handle the frustration of experience and tolerate not knowing.
Critical theory would take a different tact by focusing on obstacles to representation
as opposed to confusion within perceptions and appearance of objects. Adorno’s (2001)
lectures on Kant introduced his students to the challenge of abandoning their idealizationof the self-enclosed subject described as the “I think that accompanies all of myrepresentations.” (176). The self is not an isolate of enclosed meaning but is always in the
midst of things. Adorno proposed this something as “the Kantian Block” that heeulogized as “a kind of metaphysical mourning, a kind of memory of what is best, of
something we must not forget, but that we are nevertheless completed to forget” (178).
We know there is something more, but we cannot reach it. Or, if there is something more,it can only be an empty space that will not exist if entered (Britzman 2009).

The Lateness of Early Situations
Melanie Klein’s (1959) theory of the adult world and its roots in infancy provides
some clues as to the entangled destiny of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and history. It is atheory of an adult in the midst of very early things. Her early theories are visceral andthe mind as emotional can come as a shock. Perhaps just as shocking is her claim that thecontingencies and destiny of early anxiety situations and their phantasies have a second
life in the fields of education, law, politics, medicine, and parenting and that major
edifices of authority contain infantile reality. What do we really know about the infant’s
psychical life and the fate of the ego that emerges from the profundity of helplessness,
dependency, care, love, vulnerabilities and the phantasies that follow from thesesituations with the other? How can one get in touch with that other Kantian Block that
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Klein (1930) early on described with umwelt of anxiety, namely our attraction to “unreal
reality?” (221). Klein placed into the midst of things early anxiety situations over loss oflove, then defenses against loss made by retaliatory and paranoid activities, and thenreparation and gratitude. It is a sequence that eerily forecasts the difficulties of having tolearn before one can know.
Klein considered mental life as an emotional situation, made from crowds of others.
It would be a tiny inchoate theatre of otherness staring a series of introjected part objects
as figures and their relations. There would be the stranger, the foreigner, the uninvited,
the lover, and the disturber. I take these figurations as affects, situations and memories oflearning, and the raw material for symbolization, analysis, and creativity. They are also
the delegates of anxiety and defense. In Freud’s (1924) terms, such imagos are reflectionsof identifications in the world of others:
To the imagos they leave behind there are then linked the influences of teachers
and authorities, self-chosen models and publicly recognized heroes, whose figuresneed no long be introjected by an ego which has become more resistant. The last
figure in the series that began with the parents is the dark power of Destiny which
only the fewest of us are able to look upon as impersonal. (168)
Parents, infants, teachers, heroes, cultural objects, lost objects, and knowledge seem
like helpers until there comes disruptions, accidents, starkness, mistakes, coincidences,illness, and disasters. Even then, when all seems lost, we are never finished withelaborating our beginnings with others and do so each time we love, learn, hate, turn away,
and reach for more.

The Emotional Situation
There are plenty of variabilities within emotional situations, although the dominanttendency involves anxiety over loss. Bion’s (1994) insight was to join knowledge withthe problem of trying to know and the pain of evasion. He argued that difficulties inlearning are intimately tied to one’s theory of knowledge and preconceptions that seemto dictate how knowledge should be acquired, transmitted, felt, received, recognized, andtransferred. Imagine a teacher who can do without these preconceptions and implicit
how-to instructions. Being instructed and having to instruct have a long history: they are
ready-at-hand in the child’s game of ‘let’s play school’ where the omnipotent child
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teacher dominates those other bad children due to a theory of knowledge as possession
and a will to punish. The ‘child teacher’ is a dictator who yells and hits misbehaving
others. The phantasy is that only one person can be in charge and others must obey. The
child who plays teacher may not have been humiliated but was once a witness to thehumiliations of others.
A situation, then, is emotional when it is felt as if it can forecast destruction. Bion
(1993) argued that every encounter with unknown ideas or what one has not expected
carries threats of catastrophic change because new knowledge may destroy the valenceof deeply held beliefs and shake one’s foundational myths to the core. His conception ofknowledge, or what he termed as “K,” simply means getting to know the emotional
experience of frustration. The constellation of “K” contains elements of Freud’s (1905)
confrontation with the figure of the child as sexual researcher who links phantasy withtheory. “K” also leans on Klein’s (1928) notion of states of being as our most radical
relationality constituted through phantasies and the early sadistic epistemic instinct forcuriosity. When Antonio Ferro (2017) surveyed the psychoanalytic field with Bion inmind, he pointed out that the emotional situations of trying to know constituted “thedevelopment of psychoanalysis, where every change could be experienced as turbulence
to be avoided, even though we cannot evolve without disturbing what we know” (177).
To be subject to the tenders of its own theoretical disturbances is, perhaps, the only meansby which receptivity to unknown life can even be considered. And this admission
preoccupied Freud.
Freud’s (1937) most difficult claim for psychoanalysis appeared near the end of hislife. With some irony the problem he presented may also be a mirror to the anxieties of
education as they involve the length of treatment and running out of time. Freud had to
acknowledge, almost forty years into his psychoanalytic theory, that more was unknown
than known and that even the work of trying to know—thought of as interpretations andtransferences—were subject to intersubjective failings and the defense of ideality. A
matrix of miscommunication is also a part of the analytic relationship sincecommunication is disrupted by desire. But there is another problem that Freud’s (1937)
late essay, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” had to admit. A gain in knowledge
does not necessarily translate into affective change. One can hold a great deal ofknowledge in store and still not know what has happened to the self. One can hold a great
deal of knowledge and still be playing the child’s game ‘Let’s play teacher.’
Twenty years earlier, Freud wrote (1917) “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis”
and emphasized the defense of resistance that he understood as an emotional situation
rather than as lack of knowledge:
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I will say at once that it is not an intellectual difficulty I am thinking of, notanything that makes psychoanalysis hard for the hearer or reader to understand,but an affective one—something that alienates the feelings of those who come into
contact with it, so that they become less inclined to believe in it or take an interest
in it … the two kinds of difficulties amount to the same thing in the end. Where
sympathy is lacking, understanding will not come very easily. (137)
It is a grand paradox that interest in emotional life is still viewed as a suspicious
activity. Freud understood that psychoanalytic views hurt people’s feelings but that did
not stop him from an emotional truth when he described our nervous conditions as in the
midst of things, and so as beholden to upbringing, unconscious attitudes toward libidinallife, and egotistic fear of loss of love. Freud’s (1917) discussion is memorable for its
unrelenting description of a universal psychological blow to the illusion that
consciousness is the sum of mentality and that sexual drives are unimportant: “. . .the lifeof our sexual instincts cannot be wholly tamed, and the that mental processes are inthemselves unconscious and only reach the ego and come under its control throughincomplete and untrustworthy perceptions—these two discoveries amount to a statementthat the ego is not master in its own house” (143).

The Anthropological Situation
The ego is not master of its own house because others are already living there.
Laplanche (2017) presented the problematics of the experience of life “as fundamental
anthropological situation” of every human (20). It begins at birth when the infant is
confronted with the world of adult desire it knows nothing of. What is unconsciously
conveyed between the infant and adult is a radical gap in communication, ability, andintent. It is our original asymmetry and our situation as care and the primacy of the otheropens onto sexuality, curiosity, and the life of the mind. For both infant and mother, themeaning and destiny of acts of care and love are enigmatic and in the midst of things.
Laplanche considered relations of dependency and love and the mother’s desire astransmitted to the infant in the form of an enigmatic message that neither party can fullytranslate.
Domonique Scarfone (2018) painted the anthropological situation with the outlinesof broad brush-strokes. The situation is one of “compromised messages to which each of
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us is exposed, from birth by way of the infant’s unpreparedness with regard to thesexually saturated adult universe” (89). And yet, everyone is ill-prepared for the humancondition and no one can predicate what becomes of the fate of the anthropologicalsituation. There cannot be a complete translation of desire because no completeness canbe made. Instead, our earliest relationships leave erotic traces, impressions, and yearning.
Communication carries this affective disturbance or excitement and a failure oftranslation. The anthropological situation is one of ill- preparedness for culture, birth,sexuality, and education, and a sense of otherness.

The Transference Situation
Transference, always in the midst of things, is another term for the enigmas ofcommunication carried by feelings of having to translate relationality. Klein (1952)
coined the term “transference situation” to point out that even the most banal utterance ofher patients and even when they complained they have nothing to say, even then, these
seemingly empty utterances carried on persuasive forces of love, hate, and ambivalence
into phantasies of reception. Through her focus on anxiety and defense in mental life
Klein listened to what could not be said but could be acted out between her and the patient
as conflict, demand, compliance, hatred, and wish. She thought the self’s paranoid
perception of the other and the depressive worry over destroying the other characterized
the make-up of the mind’s oscillations and affected the ways the self could deny or get toknow the pain of incompleteness. And interpreting transference gave her this clue. She
found that the patient transferred to the analyst an imagined and real history of learningin the form of object relating that blurs the line between inside and outside, between
perception and object, and between current and past experiences.
Betty Joseph (1996) described transference as both a means to understand and aquest for and disrupter of relationality. Her focus was with the contrary transmissions ofunconscious attempts at influence:
Much of our understanding of the transference comes through our understandingof how our patients act on us to feel things for many varied reasons; how they try
to draw us into their defensive systems; how they unconsciously act out with us in
the transference, trying to get us to act out with them, how they convey aspects of
their inner world built up from infancy—elaborated in childhood and adulthood,
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the feelings aroused in us. (62)Transference situations signify not so much why we feel anything at all. Rather, as
situation, transference carries the additional element of acting as attractors to the feelingsof the other. The teacher’s affects are a complex of matters, beholden to frustration,competing investments, and projections of the introjected accumulation of the teacher’s
educational biography and imagos. All of this is conveyed each time a teacher acts, eachtime a teacher worries over the loss of knowledge, and each time the teacher listens before
they can understand. The transference situation then may contain the umwelt of educationand so, for example, the teacher’s sinking feeling of something not right may well be incontact with the silent student who feels wronged. Transference situations are our meansof relationality but also of resistance to that connection.

The Ethical Situation
Koichi Togashi (2020) has made the claim that psychoanalysis consists of a numberof turns: structural, linguistic, subjective, intersubjective, relational and, the ethical turnthat he attributes to the late work of Hans Kohut (1982) who came to the understandingthat there is no objective reality to perceive, but only “the unknowability, in principle, ofreality” (400). And this incapacity to dominate reality and even the ways one can insist
on how reality should then be perceived, Kohut argued, is a challenge to static knowledge.
Unknowability has, as its principle, a psychological subject that is also in the midst of its
own development and growth. The ethical turn, as Togashi understands, is an empathic
one that has more to do with accepting the relativity of knowing and the relativity ofperception than it does with any intuitive understanding of the other.
Togashi adds to the ethical turn the movement toward decolonizing psychoanalysis.
He describes Eastern values as a way to open, render as variable, and even overcome thedominance of Western views of the individual subject. For Togashi, “there are many
patients we cannot describe” and he goes on to ask, “How shall we understand our workand our patient’s sufferings?” (109). From Togashi’s perspective, how our work isunderstood is the area to analyze.
Decolonizing psychoanalysis is also discussed in Sally Swartz’s (2019)
Winnicottian analysis of political protest movements in South Africa and in Orange’s(2020) discussion on the radical ethics of listening. They both seek the means to challenge
psychoanalytic orthodoxies, cultural overreach, and entrenched intolerance. Their interest
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is with the priority of the other as a means to affect change within psychoanalytic practiceand the wider world. A clue that both lean on resides in the psychoanalytic taboo against
suggestion in clinical practice where its main ethic is the autonomy of the patient and theanalyst’s willingness to reflect on her own affectations through an interest in
countertransference.
Togashi’s question, however, exceeds technical orientations when he asks, “Can webe open to our patient’s accounts without formulating stories about it?” (8). His question
is a stunning alteration and challenge to the history of psychoanalysis and its transference
desire for speaking subjects who narrate their stories. Of course, we wish for expression
and of course we wish for the analysand’s desire to speak. And yet many experiencesborn of unspeakable pain and horror, specifically those of social violence, natural
catastrophes, accidents, war, and profound loss of life—many humanly induced
catastrophes and untold loss cannot become a story. From this awareness and respect for
suffering, Togashi formulates “the psychoanalytic zero,” as emptiness that expresses afundamental void without consent or will: “The psychoanalytic zero requires us to be inthis vulnerable position when we see our patients who are themselves afraid to bevulnerable” (110). All this is prior to assuming the roles of patient and analyst. He
described the ethical situation as beginning in the midst of things, in the meeting of two
humans that occur before the frame is explained, before the presenting problem is placed
between the analyst and analysand, and before there is any knowledge of either party.
The psychoanalytic zero is in the midst of things, belonging to no one, and there without
consent.
Togashi asks analysts to attend to the ways patients are encountered. It is advice
well suited for educators since, after all, encountering and receiving groups of students
they do not really know is what they do. And typically, educators do not begin theirgreetings by presenting themselves as vulnerable people meeting their students who areafraid to be vulnerable in their presence. This approach of privileging fallibility,
vulnerability, and unknowability is quite other to Western discussions that urge both theanalyst to focus on the patient’s presentations and the teacher to focus on what they think
students need before the student speaks.
What is striking for me is Togashi’s emphasis on human beings, “prior to analyst’s
and a patient’s awareness of their identities, their sense of self, and their professional,
therapeutic, social and cultural roles” (17). It is almost as if we can be returned to acommunity of infants and to our anthropological situation. Whereas Freud suggested
complete honesty with his method of free association, Togashi imagines an ethic ofsincerity and not knowing in order to consider what cannot be chosen or given consent:
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In the Midst of Things

39“The randomness of the world creates human vulnerability and loneliness” (37). He is
moving close to an empty void, an unspeakable situation of otherness without a situation.
For Togashi, the ethical turn depends upon acceptance of the analyst’s vulnerability anduncertainty and so, “to surrender herself to the moment without any distinctions including
right and wrong” (116). The analyst’s ethical turn belongs to the work of facing her or his
vulnerability, forgetting preoccupations, and accepting the limits of understanding as theground for listening to otherness. It also depends on decolonizing the ways we study andhaving the faith to be influenced by what we do not know and by what is unknowable.

In Medias Res
Jacques André (2013) suggested why early contact with the other matters: “There isno such thing as human nature from a psychoanalytic point of view. Not that nothing is
innate, but there is nothing human that is not subjected to the vicissitudes of earlyintersubjective relationships” (190). Even if our birth is inescapable and largely forgotten,
it matters that we are born into a world of others. André provides a rough sketch of infancy
as destiny rather than as nature. Nothing belongs to the subject yet there are no blankslates. The intersubjective fact begins with birth, a situation the neonate cannot giveconsent and of which we are ill prepared. Laplanche (2017) named this homemade
cultural investment as the fundamental anthropological situation, where otherness andreception are nearly inseparable.
So it is that the field of education inherits and is itself an inheritance of unconscious
experience that orients emotional expressions, wishes, anxieties, and attitudes toward themental lives of self and other. These are our educational situations that broadcast humanincompleteness, dependency, and unknowable life. But because we are also affected byrandomness, the ethical situation calls on our vulnerability in the recognition of the other’svulnerability (Togashi 2020). Ethics on loan gives the self the fragile means to tolerate
the frustrations of emotional experience that are readily expelled through preconceptions,rigid knowledge, and exhaustion. Lack of toleration can only lead to breakdowns andharsh defenses. These situations—emotion, transference, anthropological, and ethical—
already an aspect of our daily lives, are a challenge for education to stop treating itself as
if curriculum, modes of authority, theories of knowledge, and social arrangements took
instruction from reality, as if reality was knowable, and as if there was no value to thesituation of not knowing. What would it be like to take instruction from our vulnerability?
And yet, what stands before education and the reason education seems to defend against
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otherness is that its institutions are always beholden to life’s uncertainties, to therandomness of life and death, to the histories inherited and denied, and ouranthropological situation of ill preparedness. The dilemma for trying to represent all thisanxiety and all this care is that words in the midst of otherness may feel as if they aredelegates of abstract expressionism. There are so many brush strokes, erasures, overpainting, textures, splashes, and so many layers that no center can be discerned.
So, what else can the field of learning become if we are in the midst of otherness
and fragile life and, if our emotional situation is enlivened by vulnerability, dependency,
care, ethics, the passing of time, and fallibility?

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41

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Kahn, Laurence. 2018. “If only one knew what exists”. In Unrepresented states and theconstructions of meaning: Clinical and theoretical contributions. pp. 122-151.
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Klein, Melanie. 1975. Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict (1928). In Love, Guilt andReparation & Other works 1921-1945. pp. 186-198. London: Hogarth.
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In Love, Guilt and Reparation & Other works 1921-1945. pp. 219-232. London:
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Bruce Fink. pp. 364-384. New York, Norton.
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E-Journal of Philosophy of Education:
International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 6, 2021

Education from the Perspective of Psychoanalysis:
Based on Heisaku Kosawa’s Educational Consultations Documented in
the Magazine Shogaku Ichinensei (First Graders)
Minako NISHI
Kyoto University
Abstract
Clinicians often fail to pay attention to the relationship between such psychoanalytic work andeducation. Many clinicians espouse the deeply rooted notion that the psychoanalytic process will be
adversely affected if they also play the role of an educator. Therefore, they tend to avoid opportunities
to examine the relationship between these two domains. However, many cases in which therelationship between psychoanalysis and education is apparent are embedded within the history ofJapanese psychoanalysis. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to examine education from theperspective of psychoanalysis based on Heisaku Kosawa’s educational consultations that wereserialized in the magazine Shogaku Ichinensei (First Graders) shortly after World War Ⅱ.
Heisaku Kosawa (1897–1968) laid the foundations of present-day psychoanalysis in Japan. In
1932, when he was studying abroad, Kosawa met Sigmund Freud and received psychoanalytic
training from Richard Sterba. In 1935, he became a member of the International Psychoanalytical
Association (IPA) and opened a psychoanalytical clinic in Tokyo, where he practiced psychoanalysis.
He published a series of educational consultations in the magazine Shogaku Ichinensei. His advice
was characterized by a unique quality. He advised mothers to allow their children to be free and to
spoil them a lot.
Between the prewar and postwar period, an educational scholar called Seishi Shimoda (1890–
1973) proposed ideas related to the field of education that were similar to the advice that Kosawa
published in the magazine Shogaku Ichinensei. He was Kosawa’s patient. He received psychoanalytic
therapy from him once a week between October 1939 and July 1942. Pertinent details were recorded
in his book. This paper discussed the relationship between education and the demonic nature of humanbeings through these materials in the history of psychoanalysis in Japan.
Key words
history of psychoanalysis, Heisaku Kosawa, educational consultations
Correspondence:
Minako NISHI, Kyoto University. Email: nishi.minako.4w＠kyoto-u.ac.jp

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45

1. Introduction
Let us start with a story about my patient. She often got angry with me and refused
to lie down on the couch. Initially, I did not know why she was so angry with me.
However, after a while, I realized that she felt angry with me whenever I gave a
psychoanalytic interpretation. Soon, what she told me was that my interpretation intended
to lead her to a certain goal or pattern while saying, “Speak freely.” She said that this was
the same tactic that was used by a teacher whom she disliked. After hearing her criticism,
I reflected upon my words and behavior and realized that her criticism made a lot of sense.
She was completely right. I instructed her to lie down on the couch and told her to engage
in free association. As always, she pressed the intercom button on time. Then, she opened
the front door, entered the room wearing the slippers, took off her bag, removed her coat,lay down on the couch, and started engaging in free association after I said, “Let’s get
started.” In free association, one is required to freely speak about the things that come tomind. Subsequently, the therapist will give his or her interpretations. These interactions
are quite different from everyday conversations. Anyone would feel confused the firsttime they participate in this experience because she or he is unlikely to have experienced
this kind of communication in the past. However, patients eventually become acquainted
with such kinds of psychoanalytic communication. They will begin to understand therelationships among the associations embedded within the interpretations conveyed by
the therapist and eventually be able to independently discover unconscious links without
the assistance of their therapist.
Clinicians often fail to pay attention to the relationship between such psychoanalytic
work and education. Many clinicians espouse the deeply rooted notion that thepsychoanalytic process will be adversely affected if they also play the role of an educator.
Therefore, they tend to avoid opportunities to examine the relationship between these twodomains. However, many cases in which the relationship between psychoanalysis andeducation is apparent are embedded within the history of Japanese psychoanalysis.
McWilliams (2003) has noted that psychoanalysis is more educational than it is believed
to be, and this has certainly been confirmed in the history.
Therefore, the objective of this paper is to examine education from the perspectiveof psychoanalysis based on Heisaku Kosawa’s educational consultations that wereserialized in the magazine Shogaku Ichinensei (First Graders) shortly after World WarⅡ.
Kosawa laid the foundation for psychoanalysis in Japan.

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2. Education in Japanese psychoanalysis(1) Heisaku Kosawa’s educational consultations
Heisaku Kosawa (1897–1968) laid the foundations of present-day psychoanalysis
in Japan. In 1932, when he was studying abroad, Kosawa met Sigmund Freud andreceived psychoanalytic training from Richard Sterba. In 1935, he became a member of
the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and opened a psychoanalyticalclinic in Tokyo, where he practiced psychoanalysis. In Japan, psychoanalysis flourishedduring the 1920s and 1930s, and several organizations, including the Japanese branch of
the IPA, were instituted. As the war intensified, these organizations disappeared, andmembers left. However, Kosawa continued his psychoanalytical practice and became thechair of the Japanese branch of the IPA after the war. He founded the largest
psychoanalytical organization in Japan, namely, the Japan Psychoanalytical Association.
It is not well known that Kosawa published a series of educational consultations in
the magazine Shogaku Ichinensei shortly after the war. Shogaku Ichinensei is acomprehensive magazine that targets first-grade elementary school students, and it ispublished by Shogakukan. Anyone who has grown up in Japan is likely to have read thismagazine at least once. When this magazine was first published in March 1925, it wascalled “Seugaku Ichinensei”. It has since been published for approximately 100 years.
“Educational consultations for your beloved child” and “Educational consultations formothers,” which were authored by Kosawa, were published between November 1949
and August 1951 (four years after the end of the war). A total of 26 counseling cases were
documented across 21 issues. Those who sought consultations were largely mothers, andthe reasons for which they sought consultations ranged from concerns about theirchildren entering elementary school to concerns about their children’s personality (e.g.,
being bossy at home but timid outside, being greedy, and being disobedient) and physicalproblems (e.g., stuttering and ear discharge). Kosawa answered the consultations not withtitle of Psychoanalyst but as Doctor of Medicine. Although the term “psychoanalysis”
was not used, the contents of his answers clearly reflect psychoanalytic perspectives.
Moreover, his advice was characterized by a unique quality. He advised mothers to allow
their children to be free and to spoil them a lot. Despite the wide range of clients he served,
he provided similar advice to more than half of all individuals (to whom specific advice
was provided). The different kinds of advice that he provided included the following:“Go easy on your child’s selfishness as though you were trying to compensate for thelack of care (love) received during childhood,” “Try to submit to your children” “Afford
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your child greater freedom when he or she becomes selfish,” “Adore your child in all
ways possible until he or she feels satisfied,” and “Allow your child to do the things thatyou think are bad.” He provided this kind of advice because he believed that their children
had experienced a lack of care and affection from mothers during childhood, and heemphasized the role of failures to wean from breastfeeding. As he has illustrated, “If we
use weaning from breastfeeding as an example, the mother’s breast is the place where an
infant can rest and feel safe. However, with the birth of the next child, the breast must be
given up to that child. This task is very difficult for infants.” He highlighted the effects ofbreastfeeding experiences on the mental development of children and the problems
caused by separation, which are regarded as the causes of various problematic behaviors
in children.
In 1951 (when Kosawa was also discussing this issue), a compilation of John
Bowlby’s studies on the mental and physical responses of infants separated from theirmothers and the effects of separation was published. The effects of deficient maternalrearing practices on the mental and physical development of infants, which weredelineated by Bowlby, drew much attention from scholars in Japan. Subsequently,
maternal deprivation, which was examined by Bowlby, was reconceptualized as not only
a one-dimensional problem that involves the presence or absence of a mother but also a
problem that is caused by a series of more complex psychological events. For instance,
research continues to progress across multiple dimensions (e.g., comprehension anddevelopment of multiple attachment objects other than the mother and the role ofseparation in mental development). At first glance, Kosawa’s advice appears to haveoverlapped with the latest findings on the mother-child relationship that were publishedat the time. However, is this observation valid?
(2) Heisaku Kosawa and motherhood
Keiko Kida underwent psychoanalysis with Kosawa three times a week forapproximately six months. She began receiving therapy in 1941—a few years before
Kosawa began to write for Shogaku Ichinensei. Kida continued to receive guidance from
Kosawa and maintained detailed records about him. These records include several
statements that are resonant with Kosawa’s advice documented in Shogaku Ichinensei.
For example, Kosawa often proclaimed that the mercy of Buddha is his unconditional
love and that the purest form of unconditional human love is shown by mothers, who
nourish their children with their milk. Moreover, he often cited an anecdote, according towhich Buddha first attained enlightenment not in an extremely difficult situation but
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M. NISHI

when he consumed a milk-rice pudding that he had received from a young woman who
was passing by.
Kida has also described Kosawa’s own childhood. Kosawa was the ninth child, andit was difficult for his mother to care for him. Therefore, all caregiving duties wereassigned to a wet nurse. According to her records, Kosawa had described his childhoodin the following manner:
I feel that the reason why my eyesight got worse (blindness in one eye) has
something to do with the fact that I was brought up by a wet nurse. While giving asidelong glance to retaliate against the hostility of the other child, which I feared
would make me feel as though I were being stabbed, I fought fiercely and took theother child’s milk away. There is a sense of guilt and fear that stems from the factthat I gave that child a sidelong glance. I think my eyes were punished.
He may have addressed these problems when he underwent psychoanalysis.
Kosawa maintained very brief notes about his psychoanalytic sessions with Sterba.
However, his records narrate an interesting episode. Kosawa always felt the urge topurchase something when he stood in front of a candy shop. He experienced obsessive
thoughts and felt as though someone were telling him, “You are a greedy person.” This
happened in Vienna when he saw chocolates stacked against the store window. On thethird night after he had started undergoing psychoanalysis, he suddenly experienced theneed to have a bowel movement. He ran into the bathroom and had severe diarrhea. The
next morning, when he passed by the store window as usual, he was surprised to find that
his obsessive thoughts had completely disappeared.
Kosawa’s eyes looked at the chocolates wishfully, but his inner voice said, “You are
a greedy person.” The eyes of the baby (Kosawa) who is desperately fighting for his wet
nurse’s milk, the other baby whose milk has been taken away, and the baby (Kosawa)
who gave the other baby a sidelong glance all overlap with one another. This isreminiscent of the advice that he provided to mothers in Shogaku Ichinensei: “The breast
must be given up to the next child. This task is hard for an infant.” This was nothing but
a statement that stemmed from Kosawa’s heart.
Kosawa has recounted that, when he was a high school student, he felt overjoyedwhenever he returned to his parents’ house because his mother would be waiting for him
with a sweet fermented rice drink that she had prepared for him. It is very likely that milkrice pudding and sweet fermented drinks reminded him of breast milk. Kosawa said toKida, “Those battling emotional pain (including those who have had mothers) have not
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received the kind of love infants experience when their mothers breastfeed them.
Therefore, no one other than a therapist can give this to them.” Kida has noted that
Kosawa devoted his life to the pursuit of an answer to the question of “how he could help
those who had not enjoyed their own mothers’ milk sufficiently (including himself) andcompensate for this deficiency in their lives.”
When preschool education is discussed in Japan, it is often indicated thatpsychoanalytic theory underlies the “myth of a child’s first three years,” which is still
strongly endorsed even today. In other words, it refers to the notion that mothers should
devote themselves to child-rearing activities until their child reaches the age of three years.
For example, when addressing the issue of the modernization of families, especiallyduring the postwar period, Ochiai (2019) has referred to the fact that the myth of a child’s
first three years is rooted in psychoanalysis and has introduced insights propounded by
Freud and Erickson. It cannot be argued that this perspective is entirely wrong. Certainly,
psychoanalysis emphasizes the early childhood years. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory,
however, is fundamentally phallocentric and paternalistic. However, Japanese
psychoanalysis has focused on mother-child relationships since the beginning. What is
hidden in the background is not only the perspectives of psychoanalysis but also
identification with the notion of Buddha’s mercy and the relationship between Kosawa
and his mother. In postwar Japan, Gertrud Schwing’s “A Way to the Soul of the MentallyIll” (1940) gained great popularity. Even at present, it is a piece of classical literature towhich students of not only psychoanalysis but also clinical psychology and nursing are
introduced. This book presents the case of a patient with mental illness who was
bedridden and had been plunged into desolation but had begun to recover. The centralityof motherhood experiences within Schwing’s therapeutic framework is resonant with
Kosawa’s therapeutic theory.
The historical context in which such ideas gained popularity cannot be ignored.
During the war, women were encouraged to become mothers through the national policy,“Have children and raise them for the nation.” After the collapse of fatherhood following
Japan’s defeat in the war, women were encouraged to become full-time housewives andplay a primary role in child-rearing activities during the postwar high-economic growth
period. Motherhood was emphasized during this period. As a result, perspectives thatemphasized the role of motherhood in early childhood contributed to the formulation of
the concept of the Ajase complex by Keigo Okonogi, who inherited Kosawa’s idea (Nishi,2020). This concept further developed its educational meaning as a problem of mothers’
own egoism in child rearing.

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M. NISHI(3) Heisaku Kosawa and Seishi Shimoda
Between the prewar and postwar period, an educational scholar called Seishi
Shimoda (1890–1973) proposed ideas related to the field of education that were similar
to the advice that Kosawa published in the magazine Shogaku Ichinensei.
Shimoda was known within the prewar Japanese psychoanalytical community, andhe was interested in psychoanalysis from a very early stage. In 1928, Shimoda met
Alexander Sutherland Neill and visited his school. Neill practiced education grounded in
psychoanalytic theory in Summerhill School in England. After the tour, Shimoda
immersed himself in Neill’s latest book, “The Problem Child,” while returning to Japanon a ship that sailed across the Indian Ocean. He was struck by a story about Neill,
according to which he was beaten by a rebellious child and endured it for three hours
without getting angry. According to him, Affording children the freedom to do what theywant to do will help them learn to accept and forgive others. Strongly influenced by
Neill’s ideas, Shimoda published several translations, including those of a collection of
Neill’s books. He also wrote many books based on Neill’s idea of “free education” andconducted educational programs to spread these ideas within Japan. His book “Practiceof Education without Scolding” (1954) became a best-seller.
There was a period during which Shimoda was Kosawa’s patient. He received
psychoanalytic therapy from him once a week between October 1939 and July 1942.
Pertinent details were recorded in what can be considered to be an autobiography that hewrote at the age of 80 years. He has written that, during psychoanalysis, he experienced
strong feelings of affection toward his mother who had died when he was only 10 years
old. Shimoda has described this experience as follows:
The analysis started with something close to me and gradually progressed to issues
related to deeper unconscious areas. Various problems had risen there, but mostimportant of all was that my love for my mother and my affection for my mother had
dominated my life for many years.
By undergoing psychoanalysis with Kosawa, Shimoda appears to have gained
greater insights into not only himself but also education. However, after undergoing
psychoanalysis for almost three years, a serious problem had emerged. According to
Kosawa, Shimoda sought freedom and endorsed a scolding-free educational paradigm
because he had not experienced Amae during childhood. Shimoda was able to accept thisinterpretation. However, they had different opinions about what caused the emergence ofSymposium: Psychoanalysis and Education: Freudian Thought as an Educational Theory

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this need. Shimoda believed that human beings are fundamentally good. In contrast,
Kosawa believed that human nature is characterized by conflicts between good and evil.
Subsequently, he scolded Shimoda by “blasting his voice throughout the entire room”
and argued that Shimoda’s claim was nothing but the rationalization of his desire toexperience Amae. However, Shimoda refused to change his mind. He tried to prove histheory in a calm manner by offering real-life examples. However, Kosawa was notwilling to change his mind about his theory either. After several such exchanges, Kosawa
told him, “A stubborn fellow like you has paranoia. I can no longer analyze a fellow likeyou. Leave!” Consequently, psychoanalysis was terminated. Shimoda has described thisincident as follows:
Dr. Kosawa, who dismissed the notion of education without scolding, tried tochange my mind by scolding me, but I did not budge even an inch.
This is the event during which a transference had taken place. This is the time point at
which psychoanalytic development appears to have occurred. It is not an exaggeration tostate that modern psychoanalysis aims to answer the question of how these transferences
can be facilitated and how one can survive them. The transference relationship, as we cansee here, is something that has been thrown in and drowning without noticing. According
to Kosawa, “Those with mental illnesses (including those who have had mothers) have
not received the kind of love infants experience when their mothers breastfeed them.
Therefore, no one other than a therapist can give this to them. Moreover, Kosawa wrote
a paper entitled, "The Two Kinds of Guilt," and presented it to Freud. This article
discussed the guilt caused by the state of being forgiven. Forgiving others and being
forgiven were issues of great interest to Kosawa. However, there was a time when hescolded another person so loudly that his voice reverberated throughout the room. The
objective of this discussion is not to question whether Kosawa’s attitude is right or wrong.
Transference can plunge a therapist into a helpless situation that differs from the one forwhich he or she had prepared. Then, a therapist will be able to accurately understand what
is really going on in his or her patient’s mind.
Based on his psychoanalytic process with Kosawa, Shimoda wrote about the events
that had led up to his marriage to his wife. It appears as though he was trying to associatethem to his experiences with Kosawa. Shimoda’s wife was his former student. After
graduating, she became a teacher, faced various difficulties, and had come to Shimoda
for advice. Shimoda enthusiastically provided advice and guidance to his former student.
When they eventually decided to get married, Shimoda thought to himself, “From now
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on, I will teach and guide her for the rest of my life. I will also help her become a sensible
and respectable person.” However, his wife resisted his efforts in this direction. Afterseveral years of conflict with his wife, he realized that it was wrong for him to arrogantly
believe that he could teach and guide his wife. Since then, he tried to remind himself, “Ifsomeone resists, I will accept their resistance. I will never try to teach and guide them.”
Shimoda wrote about this episode within the context of his criticism of Kosawa for trying
to eliminate his resistance by scolding him. Furthermore, it was an illustration of how
resistance should be addressed in psychoanalysis. However, it is evident that his
relationship with his wife was similar to the one he shared with Kosawa across three years.
It was a relationship in which neither one was willing to compromise. Instead, they
continued to demonstrate resistance toward one another. One relationship ended when
the two parties decided to part ways out of anger, whereas the other relationship lasted alifetime.

3. Summary
This paper presented Kosawa’s desire for motherhood and a psychoanalytic processwith Shimoda, starting with a series of educational consultations he provided in Shogaku
Ichinensei after the war. These events illustrate the relationship between the demonic
nature of human beings and education. Freud has described this as follows:…we may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten
and repressed, but acts it out.1 He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action;
he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.
Psychoanalysis places paramount value on such unconscious repetitive acts (i.e.,understanding through transference). In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud focusedon those who repeat their unfortunate fate as though they have been possessed by ademon. Unfortunately, we always repeat the same mistake. With regard to theireducational beliefs, both Kosawa and Shimoda believed that it is important to give theother person the freedom to do what he or she wishes to do without scolding him or her(i.e., to forgive and accept the other person). This can certainly be found in what both ofthem have left behind. However, what actually happened between the two of them wasdifferent. It was completely the opposite of what they had been teaching mothers.
However, this may be the very reason why they passionately endorsed similar
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53

educational beliefs. During psychoanalysis, they failed to demonstrate maternal
forgiveness, which is what they were desperately seeking. The educational advice thatthey provided to mothers was also a reflection of their demonic fate and possibly their
desire to escape their fate.

References
Bowlby, J. (1951). Maternal care and mental health. Bulletin of the World HealthOrganization, 3, 355–533.
Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further
Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II). The Standard Editionof the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (19111913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works, 145-156
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Previous Principle. The Standard Edition of theComplete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920-1922):
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, 1-64.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1949) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 5(8),51.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1949) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 5(9),52-54.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1950) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)",
5(10), 61.
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beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 5(11),61.
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beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)",
5(12), 70.
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beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 6(1),69.
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Kosawa, Heisaku (1950) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 6(2),77.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1950) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 6(3),85.
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beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 6(4),89.
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beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 6(5),101.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1950) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 6(6),97.
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beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 6(7),97.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1950) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 6(8),97.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1950) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 6(9),101.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1951) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)",
6(10), 98.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1951) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 6(11),94.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1951) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)",
6(12), 112.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1951) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)",
6(13), 113.
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Education from the Perspective of Psychoanalysis

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Kosawa, Heisaku (1951) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 7(1),93.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1951) "Aiji no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling for one’s
beloved child), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 7(2),93.
Kosawa, Heisaku (1951) " Okasama no Kyouiku Soudan (Educational Counseling forMothers), " in "Shougaku Ichinensei (First Grade Elementary School)", 7(5), 86.
McWilliams, N. (2003) The Educative Aspects of Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic
Psychology, 20(2), 245-260.
Nishi, Minako, ed. （ 2020 ） Seishin Bunseki ni totte Onna toha nanika.(What is
Psychoanalysis for Women?)．Fukumura Shuppan Inc.
Ochiai, Emiko（1994）21 Seiki Kazoku he: Kazoku no Sengo Taisei no Mikata,
Koekata( The Japanese Family System in Transition)．Yuhikaku Publishing Co.,Ltd.
Schwing, G.（1940）Ein Weg zur Seele des Geisteskranken, Rascher Zürich.
Shimoda, Seishi, and Kokubu, Yasutaka, eds.（1971）Jiko Bunseki wo Kataru (Talking
about Self-analysis). Seishin Shobo, Ltd.
Watanabe, Hisako（1984）Boseiteki Youiku no Hakudatsu to Seishin Bunseki (Sono
1)(Maternal Deprivation and Psychoanalysis (1st)). The Japanese Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 28(3), 91-106.

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E-Journal of Philosophy of Education:
International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 6, 2021

Beyond the Trauma Principle in Education:
Does Freud’s Concept of Nachträglichkeit Imply the Possibility ofRetroactive Education?
Akira GESHI
Chuo University

Introduction: Beyond the Trauma Principle?
From their birth to the present day, Freudian theory and psychoanalysis have been
the subject of both intense praise and criticism. Sigmund Freud’s conceptualization of theunconscious mind has had a profound impact on various fields of the humanities andsocial sciences, in addition to psychiatry and clinical psychology. For example, the“trauma theory” originally proposed by Freud, which holds that psychic trauma that
occurs between infancy and childhood can have serious consequences, is widely
accepted, shared, and understood in our society. However, despite its significant influence,
Freudian theory has been severely criticized for its lack of rigor and consistency, while
Freudian psychoanalysis has been questioned for its low reproducibility and failure tosatisfy scientific requirements.
This study focuses on Freudian theory because it has the potential to transcend these
criticisms. In particular, Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit is still open toreconsideration in the context of educational theory; thus, this study applies the concept
of Nachträglichkeit to educational theory and presents a new model of education, called“retroactive education.” In their excellent dictionary of psychoanalytic terms, The
Language of Psychoanalysis, Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis explain Nachträglichkeit(après-coup or deferred action) as follows: “[This] term [is] frequently used by Freud inconnection with his view of psychical temporality and causality: experiences,
impressions and memory-traces may be revised at a later date to fit in with fresh
experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development. They may in that event
be endowed not only with a new, meaning but also with psychical effectiveness”(Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 111). Since Nachträglichkeit is often described in relation
Correspondence:
Akira GESHI, Chuo University. Email: geshiakira.chuo.u＠gmail.com

Beyond the Trauma Principle in Education57

to etiology, it is generally considered to have negative implications; however, I proposethat it may be possible to apply Freud’s Nachträglichkeit theory to education and humanformation (Bildung in German) theory in a positive manner.
At the outset, I would like to raise two questions regarding the foundations ofmodern educational theories. The first relates to the model of causality in educational
theory. The model of causality discussed in this paper means the influence that a particularcause contributes to the production of a particular result. In general, in the social sciences,
it is thought that there are complex factors and processes involved in the cause-effectrelationship. However, a number of educational programs and policies in Japan continue
to be based on the simple model of causality. In addition, there are many examples ofsuch policies and programs in which the distinction between causality and correlation is
unclear. One of the most famous illustrations of this confusion in recent years is
exemplified by the national campaign, “Hayane, Hayaoki, Asagohan” (“Early to Bed,
Early to Rise, and Don’t Forget Your Breakfast”), promoted by the Japanese Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). 1 Moreover, in recent
years, the successful operation of the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle, based on thecausality theory of learning, is assumed to be the primary proof of excellent education.
For instance, in “The Second Basic Plan for the Promotion of Education” (provisionaltranslation), MEXT clearly states: “In preschool, compulsory (elementary and lower
secondary), and upper secondary school education, the government aims to develop in
all children a definite zest for life by promoting collaboration and cooperation among
schools, families, and communities and by completing the PDCA cycle in order toexamine and improve educational contents and methods, educational environments, andthe educational system, based on objective data” (MEXT 2013).
The other question relates to gradual learning theory, which is based on
1

This campaign has been implemented by MEXT in cooperation with a private organization called “Hayane,
Hayaoki, Aasagohan Zenkoku Kyougi-Kai” (National Council for the Promotion of “Early to Bed, Early to Rise,and Don’t Forget Your Breakfast”), which was established in 2006. While there may be a correlation between ahealthy lifestyle and academic achievement, this cannot be explained by simple causality; numerous studies
indicate that children’s academic achievement is determined by complex factors such as economic power, socialand cultural capital of families, and parents’ interest in their children (Kariya et al. 2004). Nevertheless, in several
brochures and websites, MEXT repeatedly appeals to students to follow these three habits, especially eating
breakfast, implying that doing so will surely lead to an improvement in academic achievement. For instance, see
the two official brochures published by MEXT for elementary school students, “‘Hayane, hayaoki, Asagohan’ te
Shitteru kana?” (“Do you know ‘Early to Bed, Early to Rise, and Don’t Forget Your Breakfast’?”) (available
online: https://www.mext.go.jp/kids/find/kyoiku/mext_0020.html), and “Dekiru Kotokara Hajimetemiyou ‘Hayane,
hayaoki, Asagohan’” (“Let’s start with what you can do, ‘Early to Bed, Early to Rise, and Don’t Forget YourBreakfast’”) (available on https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/shougai/asagohan/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2020/1324879_1.pdf).

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developmental stage theory, and relies on the assumption that education should be
provided according to a child’s developmental stage and the readiness of the learner. This
schema, in general, is said to have been discovered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau anddeveloped by Jean Piaget, and is the foundation of the “Courses of Study” (the school
curriculum criteria) in primary and secondary education in Japan.2 Furthermore, therecent university reform movement in Japan has also advocated for a gradual andstandardized curriculum that will enable the “quality assurance” of university education.3
Here, I question this assumption and argue that some knowledge and experiences which
are far beyond the learner’s development stage and understanding can sometimes haveimportant implications for them later in life, and question whether such a view of
education deprives learners of the opportunity to break their own framework ofunderstanding, thereby robbing them of the great opportunity of learning.
To this end, this paper will reexamine trauma theories and present a new concept oflearning called “retrospective education.” In accordance with the principle of causality,
trauma theories postulate that trauma (i.e., the cause) leads to disease (i.e., the result). In
response to this assumption, the concept of “retrospective education” presented in thispaper criticizes the causal scheme in which the implementation of a particular educational
practice at particular developmental stage is believed to lead to a particular result.
Thereafter, I propose a model in which a present or newer stimulus (new experience)
activates a cause (old or preceding experience) that occurred in the past to retroactively
produce education in the present. Moreover, unlike developmentally appropriate practice(DAP) in educational theory, this model demonstrates the possibility that experiences
beyond the learner’s understanding can be retroactively (ex post facto) processed, andthese experiences can also be characterized as educational.
It may become possible to reconsider the theoretical premise of modern educational
theories, and to re-examine the common understanding of education with the affirmationof two aforementioned hypotheses. I believe that it is one of the missions of thephilosophy of education to challenge the assumptions of our own educational theories
just as Freud’s psychoanalysis highlighted the limitations of conventional psychology.
2

The Courses of Study, first formulated in 1947, which regulate the educational goals and content of elementaryand secondary schools in Japan, are based on Piaget’s developmental stage theory (Geshi 2013). Even in recent
years, developmental stage theory has continued to form the basis for the Courses of Study. The Curriculum
Division of the Elementary and Secondary Education Department of MEXT has provided an appendix documentwith the Courses of Study in 2021 that states “supporting students’ development” is one of the most important
aspects of education, and requires each school to “enhance instruction based on the developmental stages” (MEXT
2021: 23-28).
3
See https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo4/houkoku/attach/1302346.htm (Japanese language)
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I. Beyond the Model of Causality and Learning Stage Theory
1. Revisiting the Model of Causality
First, I would like to reconsider the model of causality according to which our sharedunderstanding of education assumes that certain causes lead to certain results. As a typicalexample of causality, we will examine the “trauma theory” which evolved under the
influence of Freudian psychoanalytic theories. It might be argued that the trauma theory,
which posits that childhood trauma can lead to the development of mental diseases anddisorders, has had more of an impact on education than any other psychoanalytic theory.
For instance, Alexander Sutherland Neill’s Summerhill School, which allows children agreat deal of freedom with the aim of avoiding trauma and repression among students,
could be considered a clear application of trauma theory (Neil 1972). A more extreme
example is the work of Alice Miller who, after criticizing “poisonous pedagogy,” rejectededucation in all its forms, deeming it inherently traumatic for children (Miller 1983).
These two examples present variations within the trauma theory model. It should also be
noted that the trauma theory of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) was formally
included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition(DSM-III) published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, and has continued
to appear as such, even in the updated DSM-V, published in 2013.
As is well known, some scholars consider Freud’s early “seduction theory”(Verführungstheorie) to be a precursor of PTSD as it was defined in the DSM-III. Freudinitially believed that sexual seduction (which would be regarded as sexual assault andabuse by today’s standards) was the cause of neurosis. However, from the autumn of1897 onward, Freud began to change his thinking by indicating that seductive scenes thatwere narrated contained phantasies and, therefore, began focusing on the psychic reality
itself. In 1950 (English translation 1954), Ernst Kris coined this development as the“abandonment of the seduction hypothesis” (Verzichts auf die Verführungshypothese)and hailed it as a great step in the birth of psychoanalysis (Kris 1950: 36; 1954: 29).
However, toward the end of the 1970s, in response to trends such as anti-psychiatry
and anti-pedagogy, many observers began to criticize Freud’s transition strongly. AliceMiller, for example, criticizes Freud’s psychoanalytic theory for masking real sexual
abuse by understanding the patient’s traumatic memories as an expression of the Oedipus
complex (Miller 1984). Similarly, Judith Lewis Herman, who popularized the concept of
psychological trauma, also strongly criticized Freud’s abandonment of the seduction
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A. GESHI

hypothesis, stating that it regularly led to the assessment of actual abuse as a patient’s
phantasies, which also resulted in the concealment of criminal acts (Herman 1992).4
Nonetheless, while some researchers contend that Freud’s seduction theory was theforerunner of trauma theory or PTSD, I insist that it could never be categorized as asimple trauma theory. The variations of trauma theory by Neill, Miller, and Herman
described above were all based on the concept of causality, according to which the pastdefines the present. However, it is not commonly known among non-specialists that there
are aspects of Freud’s theory of trauma, which extend beyond simple causality. As
mentioned above, from the autumn of 1897 onward, Freud abandoned his belief that the
seduction scenes which his patients mentioned were correct memories or accurate
reflections of real events, and began to emphasize “psychical reality” as distinct fromexternal reality: “fundamentally what is involved here is unconscious desire and its
associated phantasies,” as Laplanche and Pontalis explain (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973:363). Thereafter, advancing from the naive theory of trauma, Freud developed his
psychoanalytic theory and the concept of Nachträglichkeit.
The idea of “retroactive education” presented here, based on Freud’s concept ofNachträglichkeit, might open the possibility of the theory of education and humandevelopment that extends beyond the model of causality based on linear temporality,
even if that model can explain some educational practices. The first question posed in thispaper is: Can the entire practice of education be understood within the reductionist
framework of a cause-effect paradigm or the model of causality?
2. Revisiting Learning Stage Theory
The second question I would like to pose relates to learning stage theory. It is
commonly believed that there are different stages of children’s learning, and modern
educational theory assumes that education should be based on children’s developmental
stages. Freud asserted that childhood sexual experiences tend to manifest as trauma laterin life, as sex cannot be understood before puberty. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”(1920), he compared the psychic apparatus to a “living vesicle” with a “receptive corticallayer” that protects the subject from external stimuli (Freud 1920, S.E. 18: 27; G.W. 13:
26). When a strong stimulus breaks through this protective surface and invades theinterior, it causes “traumatic neurosis” (Freud 1920, S.E. 18: 31; G.W. 13: 31). This
4

How Freud reached his abandonment of seduction theory, as well as the issues pertaining to the formulation of theabandonment of seduction theory, is summarized in Geshi (2006).

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protective shield is reminiscent of the “pedagogical barrier” described by German
pedagogical theorist Klaus Mollenhauer. According to Mollenhauer, education does not
simply “present” but rather “represents” the reality in which adults live, as it is, to protect
children from real, visceral violence by adding a “filter” to the world and reconstructingit (Mollenhauer 1983).
The second question, then, is will an experience that ignores one’s developmental
stage and readiness, breaks through Freud’s so-called “protective shield” andMollenhauer’s “filter,” and goes beyond one’s comprehension only have negative
consequences? In other words, can there be so-called “positive traumatic” experiences
or any positive impact associated with trauma?5

II. The First Formulation of Nachträglichkeit: The Case of Emma
1. Nachträglichkeit and the Model of Causality
Freud discussed deferred action in relation to etiology; however, Nachträglichkeit
is not a simple causal theory. Laplanche and Pontalis describe the significance andadvantages of Nachträglichkeit in the following manner:
The first thing the introduction of the notion does is to rule out the summaryinterpretation which reduces the psycho-analytic view of the subject’s history to alinear determinism envisaging nothing but the action of the past upon the present(Laplanche and Pontalis 1973:111-112).
However, the English translation does not fully reflect the nuance ofNachträglichkeit. In the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud (S.E.), edited by James Strachey, the translation of Nachträglichkeit is“deferred action.” Helmut Thomä and Neil Cheshire insist this choice of terminology
may lead to a reading of Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit as a simple direction of
causality (Thomä et al. 1991). As a starting point in the search for the traumatic event,Freud assessed the result of the disease or disorder and then sought the cause in the past.

5

It has been claimed that positive personality transformation can occur after experiencing psychological trauma(Jayawickreme et al. 2014); however, this concept differs from that of the “retroactive education” that I present inthis paper.

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A. GESHIIn this way, the causality of Freudian psychoanalysis can be considered the “backwardcausation” that Japanese philosopher Masaki Ichinose presented after examining thediscussion of causality in Western philosophy. According to Ichinose, “Our causal inquiry
begins with the recognition of the result as an extraordinary event, and then the cause thatis considered to have caused the result is revealed” (Ichinose 2001: 130–132, 173,translation by the author).
Gregory Bistoen et al. also suggested that the English translation of “deferred action”
does not adequately capture the retrospective connotation of the German
Nachträglichkeit. “Deferred action suggests that something is deposited in the individual
at T1 that suddenly detonates, like a time bomb, at T2” (Bistoen et al. 2014:674). The
authors then examined Freud’s Nachträglichkeit theory in one of his earliest works,“Project for a Scientific Psychology” (Freud 1950, written in 1895). “Emma,” a case thatappears in this unpublished work by Freud, has a compulsion that prevents her fromgoing to the shops alone. When she was eight years old, a shopkeeper had touched hergenitals through her clothes (T1), although she did not understand the implications of thisact at the time. However, upon reaching sexual maturity at the age of twelve, an event
during which two shop assistants in another store laughed at her (T2) caused her memoryof the previous experience (T1) to resurface, thereby activating a trauma response. Such
activation is known as “deferred action.” It should be noted that the modern-day diagnosis
of PTSD only focuses on the second traumatic experience (T2) while often failing to take
into account the first trauma (T1) (Bistoen et al. 2014: 674).
2. Retrospective Construction of Traumatic Scenes
Though we have already seen that Freud’s method of exploring etiology is a formof “backwards causality,” his Nachträglichkeit theory is somewhat more complex in its
temporal nature. Freud described Emma’s case as “typical of repression in hysteria” andas “a memory [that] is repressed that has only become a trauma by deferred action[Nachträglichkeit].” In Freud’s words, “Now this case is typical of repression in hysteria.
We invariably find that a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma bydeferred action [Nachträglichkeit]. The cause of this state of things is the retardation ofpuberty as compared with the rest of the individual’s development” (Freud 1950[1895],
S.E.1:356; G.W.nb:448).
However, when we read “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” we find that thedescriptions of the events that Emma is said to have experienced are arranged in an
opposite order to the arrangement presented by Bistoen et al. (2014). These authors
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described the trauma that Emma sustained at the age of eight as “T1,” and her trauma at
the age of twelve as “T2” on the time axis, whereas Freud described Emma’s trauma at
twelve years of age as “Scene I” and at eight years of age as “Scene II,” according to theorder of recall in the analysis (Freud 1950 [1895], S.E.1: 353–354; G.W.nb: 445–446).
The question of where to place the starting point becomes important in thedevelopment of Nachträglichkeit theory. The trauma that Emma sustained at the age ofeight was believed to have actually occurred. However, as described above, Freudoverturned his position in 1897 that traumatic memories reflect reality. Freud’s so-called“abandonment of the seduction theory” led to the development of the view that childhood
memories are not necessarily a reflection of reality, but rather a mixture of both phantasy
and reality. In “Screen Memories” (1899), he observed that the scene of trauma does not“emerge” but is “formed” at the time of recall:
Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they
appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods ofarousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge;
they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern forhistorical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of thememories themselves (Freud 1899, S.E.3:322; G.W.1:553-554).
However, even if the scene of trauma could be reconstructed through analysis, Freudclaimed the trauma itself existed before the analysis and became a disorder after thesecond event. This Nachträglichkeit theory was further refined in the case of the “Wolf
Man.”

III. The Second Formulation of Nachträglichkeit: The Case of the “Wolf Man”
1. The most famous example of Nachträglichkeit
There are two main periods in which Nachträglichkeit (or nachträglich) appears
frequently in Freud’s writings. The first is in the work he published during the period of
his initial contemplation, which lasted until 1902. The second is in “From the History ofan Infantile Neurosis” (1918), which is also known as the case of the “Wolf Man”
(Thomä et al. 1991: 408-409).
As Freud himself recognized, he needed to rethink the concept of Nachträglichkeit
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A. GESHIin the “Wolf Man” in order to clarify the theoretical differences to his former colleagues,
Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung, who broke away from Freud between 1911 and 1913.
Both Adler and Jung regarded trauma as a reflection of a patient’s current conflict, andnot as a real event in the past. James Strachey, the editor and principal translator of theStandard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (S.E.), notes“The primary significance of the case history in Freud’s eyes at the time of its publication
was clearly the support it provided for his criticisms of Adler and more especially of Jung”(Strachey 1955, S.E.17:5), who asserted that early childhood memories were merely areflection of a patient’s current situation:
The greater part of the psychoanalytic school is still under the spell of the conceptionthat infantile sexuality is the sine qua non of neurosis. It is not only the theorist,
delving into childhood simply from scientific interest, but the practicing analyst also,
who believes that he has to turn the history of infancy inside out in order to find thefantasies conditioning the neurosis. A fruitless enterprise! In the meantime the mostimportant factor escapes him, namely, the conflict and its demands in the present. In
the case we have been describing, we should not understand any of the motives
which produced the hysterical attacks if we looked for them in earliest childhood.
Those reminiscences determine only the form, but the dynamic element springs
from the present, and insight into the significance of the actual moment alone gives
real understanding (Jung 1913, C.W.4:167).
In opposition to Adler and Jung, Freud emphasized the significance of the pastexperience in etiology, describing the points of the dispute between them as “thesignificance of the infantile factor.” For Freud, the “Wolf Man” was a clear case thatproved “the influence of childhood” as an etiology:
I am of opinion that the influence of childhood makes itself felt already in thesituation at the beginning of the formation of a neurosis, since it plays a decisivepart in determining whether and at what point the individual shall fail to master thereal problems of life.
What is in dispute, therefore, is the significance of the infantile factor. The problem
is to find a case which can establish that significance beyond any doubt. Such,however, is the case [Wolf Man] which is being dealt with so exhaustively in thesepages and which is distinguished by the characteristic that the neurosis in later life
was preceded by a neurosis in early childhood (Freud 1918, S.E.17:54; G.W.12:83).
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The “Wolf Man” was a Russian man whom Freud began analyzing when the subject
was twenty-three years old. This man had developed an infantile neurosis just before his
fourth birthday, which lasted up until approximately the age of ten. He had also suffereda breakdown at the age of seventeen, triggered by gonorrhea (Freud 1918, S.E.17: 121;
G.W.12:157). The analysis revealed that the cause of his symptoms was not an external
trauma, but rather an anxiety dream of a wolf (Freud 1918, S.E.17: 28; G.W.12:53).6 The
Wolf Man recalled:
I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foottowards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I
know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window
opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves weresitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them.
The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had
big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention
to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed
and woke up (Freud 1918, S.E.17:29; G.W.12:54).
This dream occurred immediately before his fourth birthday, which was on
Christmas Day. Thereafter, Freud supposed that before the anxiety dream of the wolf took
place, there must have been an original element, i.e., the primary scene, that was distorted
and represented as the dream. The scene was that of his parents copulating, which the“Wolf Man” had witnessed at the age of eighteen months:
If, however, the effects of a scene of this sort appear in the child’s fourth or fifth year,
then he must have witnessed the scene at an age even earlier than that (Freud 1918,
S.E.17:56; G.W.12:85).
What sprang into activity that night out of the chaos of the dreamer’s unconscious
memory-traces was the picture of copulation between his parents, copulation incircumstances which were not entirely usual and were especially favourable for6

In the Wolf Man’s case, the threat of castration by his babysitter and the seduction of his older sister can berecognized between the primal scene and the anxiety wolf-dream. Although these events may have formed partof the etiology, they are not considered in this paper.

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A. GESHI

observation (Freud 1918, S.E.17:36; G.W.12:63).
This primal scene that the Wolf Man had witnessed at the age of one and a half years
finally became understandable at the age of four as a result of his maturing. During thistime, as with any trauma and/or seduction, the event gained an etiological significancedue to “deferred operation [nachträgliche Wirkung]”:
We have now carried our account down to about the time of the boy’s fourth birthday,
and it was at that point that the dream brought into deferred operation [nachträgliche
Wirkung] his observation of intercourse at the age of one and a half. It is not possible
for us completely to grasp or adequately to describe what now ensued. The
activation of the picture, which, thanks to the advance in his intellectual
development, he was now able to understand, operated not only like a fresh event,but like a new trauma, like an interference from outside analogous to the seduction(Freud 1918, S.E.17:109; G.W.12:144).
However, Freud avoided casting judgment on the reality of the primal scene at thisstage of the analysis since determining whether the primal scene was an actual experienceor a phantasy would not yield significant results:
I should myself be glad to know whether the primal scene in my present patient’s
case was a phantasy or a real experience; but, taking other similar cases into account,
I must admit that the answer to this question is not in fact a matter of very great
importance. These scenes of observing parental intercourse, of being seduced inchildhood, and of being threatened with castration are unquestionably an inheritedendowment, a phylogenetic heritage, but they may just as easily be acquired bypersonal experience. [....]All that we find in the prehistory of neuroses is that a child catches hold of this
phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. I fully agree with Jungin recognizing the existence of this phylogenetic heritage; but I regard it as amethodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before the ontogenetic
possibilities have been exhausted (Freud 1918, S.E.17:97; G.W.12:131).
At first glance, it appears as if the position Freud is describing here is similar to thatof Adler and Jung, who saw memory as a reflection of the present. However, Freud
maintained that even if a trauma scene is reconstructed through analysis, or the scene
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Beyond the Trauma Principle in Education67

itself is a phantasy, it is still a trigger from the past that operates after the event took place.7
2. The second example of Nachträglichkeit
It should be noted that in the case of the “Wolf Man,” Freud is discussing “anotherinstance of deferred action.” Going back in time, according to the analysis process, it ispossible to recall the anxiety dreams (S2) of a four-year-old in the analysis of a twentyfive-year-old (S1), with the primal scene witnessed by a one-and-a-half-year-old (S3)forming the basis of such dreams. When the Wolf Man becomes conscious of the primal
scene (S3) that he witnessed at the age of one and a half (S1) and understands it during
the course of the analysis, he returns to his “self” at the age of four (S2). In other words,
the time between S3 and S2 disappears, and the infantile neurosis is resolved.
We must forget the actual situation which lies behind the abbreviated description
given in the text: the patient under analysis, at an age of over twenty-five years, wasputting the impressions and impulses of his fourth year into words which he would
never have found at that time. If we fail to notice this, it may easily seem comic andincredible that a child of four should be capable of such technical judgements andlearned notions. This is simply another instance of deferred action[Nachträglichkeit]. At the age of one and a half the child receives an impression towhich he is unable to react adequately; he is only able to understand it and to be
moved by it when the impression is revived in him at the age of four; and only
twenty years later, during the analysis, is he able to grasp with his conscious mental
processes what was then going on in him. The patient justifiably disregards the three
periods of time, and puts his present ego into the situation which is so long past
(Freud 1918, S.E.7:45; G.W.12:72).
The sequence of the recollection and timeline of events, based on Freud’s
description, are presented in Figure 1 below. If we were to elaborate on Freud’s
description, there would be two Nachträglichkeit.

7

The discussion between Freud and Jung on the possibility of the primal scene originating from phylogenetic
heritage is discussed in Geshi (2006: I-3).

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A. GESHI【Figure 1: The sequence of recollection and timeline of events in the “Wolf Man” case】
Timeline
Effect
S1

Recollection
Psychoanalysis(Twenty-five years old: Linguistic understanding of the etiology)= The second Nachträglichkeit (return to a four-year-old boy)

S2

The Wolf-dream(Four years old: symbolic understanding of the trace and disease onset)= The first Nachträglichkeit (infantile neurosis)

S3

The primal scene (the original cause of disease)(One and a half years old: The trace that forms an etiology later)

Ⅳ. Application: The Pedagogical Turn of Freud’s Nachträglichkeit
1. An Educational Theory of Nachträglichkeit
Based on these examples, this study presents an educational theory that re-envisions
the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit in the form of a theory of “retroactive
education.” First, this educational theory of Nachträglichkeit assumes the occurrence ofan extreme experience that breaks through “protective shield” identified by Freud, or“filter” to borrow the term used by Mollenhauer, to block out the harsh (extreme) reality,
and the experience leaves only a memory trace as a result of its going beyond the realmof an individual’s understanding at the time (S1). Nevertheless, it acts a posteriori,
through later experience (S2). Second, in this theory, the original traumatic experience(S1) operates after the later traumatic event (S2), and these experiences are not limited tothe sexual domain, as in Freud’s theory. As Freud observed, the reason a sexual
experience in childhood can become a posttraumatic event is that sexual maturity has not
yet been reached. Similarly, events or experiences that are beyond the understanding of achild or an individual in an immature state can also be processed retroactively, and thiscan lead to retroactive learning. Furthermore, as Britzman (2010) indicated, there is an
unconscious drive behind learning and education; thus, besides the narrowly defined
sexual experiences of Freud’s theory, other non-sexual experiences can also come to have
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retroactive and educational value after the fact. Third, such “retroactive education” does
not necessarily require psychoanalytical therapy. Freud understood his early childhood
through his own self-analysis, which he described in letters to Wilhelm Fließ (Freud
1985; 1986). Even if one does not conduct a thorough self-analysis like Freud’s, it ispossible that deferred understanding and transformation can still be brought about
through introspection, dialogue with others, and new experiences.
In summary, past experiences of which individuals are unaware because theseexperiences were, at one point, beyond the realm of their comprehension, can eventually
be understood through the occurrence of similar experiences after puberty. In this way,
responses to past events are activated afterward and bring about changes in the self. The
self is then reconstructed by linking and understanding the two separate experiences that
occurred, after the point at which these experiences took place. However, it is impossible
to predict in advance what kind of experience will be activated at a later time.
Thus, it is necessary to explore the kinds of experiences that are recognized as“educational” upon later reflection. The work of Jacques Lacan is relevant in this regard.
While the training standards of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA)
require “a training analysis” that differs from “a therapeutic analysis,” Lacan criticized
this institutional distinction. “For Lacan, there is only one form of analytic process,” asDylan Evans (1996: 210) observed. Lacan established his own school (the École
Freudienne de Paris) and created new training criteria called “the pass” (le passant).
However, in the Lacanian system, there are no pre-established criteria for deciding
whether to admit a candidate as an analyst: “The jury then decides… whether to award
the pass to the candidate. There were no pre-established criteria to guide the jury, since
the pass was based on the principle that each person’s analysis is unique” (Evans
1996:135). Lacan states that whether an analysis is considered a training analysis or not
can only be determined after it is complete. As the Japanese psychoanalyst Kosuke Tsuiki
observed, the Lacanian “pass” is, thus, not merely a certification system forpsychoanalysts; rather, certifying an individual as an analyst must be also an affirmationof the psychoanalytic process (Tsuiki 2008: 348–349). However, institutional stability inpsychoanalysis cannot be guaranteed if the nature of psychoanalysis itself is re-examined
every time an analyst is born, and such issues may be at the root of the long-standing
dispute between Lacanian groups as to the definition of psychoanalysis.
2. Examples of “Retroactive Education”
At this point, I would like to provide some examples in relation to the theory of
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A. GESHI“retroactive education” described above. I believe that many of those who study
philosophy and the philosophy of education have experienced “retroactive education.”
Such experiences might involve the reading of complex documents, including classicaltexts, which often require a re-reading. The experience of re-reading is a good example
of deferred learning. For instance, a book that was impossible to understand at first canbe retroactively understood by the act of re-reading, or a reader might sometimes
understand the meaning of a text only after they have matured. If the meaning of the text
is restructured by a later (re-)re-reading, the event of the first reading will still function as
the determining factor that leads to changes in the present self after the event.
Encountering the unknown – in the example above, a text that is not understood at thetime of reading it – has important implications for the future.
Going on the Grand Tour (traveling abroad), which John Amos Comenius (1967[1633–1638]: Chap.31) and John Locke (1989 [1693]: Chap.23) recommended as thefinishing touch of education, might be another example of retroactive education. The
main purpose of traveling abroad during the Middle Ages in Europe was to go on apilgrimage; however, this practice gradually came to be understood as an important
activity for broadening an individual’s knowledge in general. Such journeys could be
unpredictable and beset by danger (Chard 1999; Black 2011). However, that is exactly
why they were thought to hold significance in helping individuals understand the world,
as they forced the traveler to go beyond the existing realm of their own understanding.
An encounter with a different part of the world can also make it possible to (better)interpret an impression of a former experience that one might have had in the past, which
could not be understood at that point in time, thereby reconstructing the self. Furthermore,recalling a past journey may have the effect of reconstructing the self retroactively.
In addition, when we read essays on school life, we often come across episodes
detailing how the authors were shocked by people and/or texts they could not seem tounderstand. One such example is an essay by the famous Japanese writer Morio Kita, inwhich he reflects on his life in the old high school system that was equivalent to the liberalarts program of today’s universities and abolished in 1950. In his essay, Kita recalls his
admiration for the seniors and their intellectual knowledge, and his amazement at theircasual use of academic terms he could not understand at all: “It[intellectual awakening]
first appeared to me in the form of senior students. How great they seemed to us! They
seemed to have been taught directly by people like Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, whosenames I only knew, and they seemed to be friends with Shakespeare, Goethe, andDostoevsky. They spoke bewildering words like Gemeinschacht, Aufheben, Logos,
Pathos, and so on… We admired them and wished we could be like them. Good or bad,
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this is what we call the tradition of high school under the old system of education” (Kita
2000: 36, translation by the author).
These accounts then explain that while the authors were unable to deduce themeaning of something that they could not understand at the time of the encounter, they
were able to understand its significance later. In other words, the experiences that they
could not understand in the past were later understood, given meaning to, and contributed
towards the formation of a sense of “self.”

Conclusion: Revisiting the Concept of Education from the Perspective of“Retroactive Education”
As mentioned in the introduction, traditional educational theories have comparededucation to the process of developing a seed into a plant by providing it with water andsunlight at the right time.
This assumption relies on the model of causality (stimulus-response) and the modelof developmentally appropriate teaching.
This study critiques these assumptions by examining Freud’s concept ofNachträglichkeit and attempting to apply it to educational theory, proposing a new model
called “retroactive education.” Experiences (sometimes “traumatic”) that go beyond therealm of understanding at the point of their occurrence can transform an individual’s
personality by becoming comprehensible later on. If such a transformation is a negative
one, then it becomes a disease or a disorder (e.g., PTSD); however, if the transformation
has a positive effect, such as Kita’s episode, it can be characterized as educational (i.e., a“positive” traumatic experience).
However, the reader might wonder whether “retroactive education,” should be
regarded as “education” at all. This is because education is generally considered to be aplanned practice, the outcome of which can be predicted to some extent. In other words,
education is an activity that is planned based on the prediction of learning outcomes basedon teaching strategies/practices/methods/methodologies.
On the other hand, “retroactive education” presented in this paper is entirely
unpredictable. No one can predict whether an experience that can only be understoodafter the event will have a positive effect, nor is it possible to determine which experience
will turn out to be positive in the first place. As mentioned earlier, Bistoen et al. compared“deferred action” to a “time bomb.” In keeping with this analogy, the concept of“retroactive education,” presented in this paper may be likened to a “land mine” – no one
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A. GESHI

knows where it might be and when it might explode, or in fact whether it exists at all.
In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I believe that “retroactive education” is aform of education that has not received any attention. The concept of “retroactive
education,” enables us to better understand phenomena related to education and humanformation (Bildung) that we have not been able to make sense of within the frameworkof traditional educational theories. Let us be more ambitious and let our imaginations run
wild without hesitation. If we do so, we may find that many phenomena that have been
understood within the scope of “education” can in fact be classified as “retrospective
education,” but were analyzed in terms of traditional educational theories such as theories
of developmental stages and causality.

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International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 6, 2021

[A Comment on the Symposium]

Acceptance of “Otherness”:
The Uncanny, Helplessness, and the Unpredictable
Tadashi NISHIHIRA
Kyoto University
Abstract
Despite the fact that psychoanalysis and education are adjacent academic fields, they each have a
different way of looking at things. The objectives of the two fields are different, and what theyemphasize are also different. As such, discussions between the two do not tend to align well with eachother. Moreover, when the issue of translation is taken into consideration, the discussion becomes evenmore complex. Without a careful choice of language, the discussion will go nowhere.
This paper will examine three reports that were presented at an online debate titled“Psychoanalysis and Education: Freudian Thought as an Educational Theory” in the 63rd Annual
Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan (PESJ). I will assume that the reader has
already read the articles compiled in the reports, and I shall extract a few points for consideration here.

1. What is “Otherness”?
The keyword for Prof. Britzman’s ideas is “otherness”, which has been translated as“tashasei” in Japanese. While this is not a mistranslation, this kind of convenienttranslational equivalent using the word “tashasei” does not convey the chaotic depth of
the unknowability that the original term tries to highlight. Given the nature of chaos, itcannot possibly be explained in a single word. It has been rephrased in various ways: “theunknown,” “unconscious situations,” “that which cannot be wholly tamed,” “theuncanny,” and so on. Prof. Britzman states that no one is immune to such otherness. It isalways something unknowable to us, it is an uncontrollable strangeness that disturbs thestability and instills apprehension. Furthermore, otherness is also spoken of in connection
with the “helplessness in infantile life.” Otherwise, it is also spoken of with “the influenceof the other” or “the primacy of fantasy life.” Traditional depth psychology has called this“the unconscious,” or “unconscious energy.” Freud called it “Es.” In any case, we are
Correspondence:
Tadashi NISHIHIRA, Kyoto University. Email: nishihira.tadashi.7c＠kyoto-u.ac.jp

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77

unable to know its true character, and we can neither recognize nor become conscious ofit. That unknown something that we cannot become conscious of is what Prof. Britzman
calls “otherness.”
On Being Helpless
What is exceedingly interesting is the word “helpless.” This is that “which cannot
be controlled but can nonetheless be the most important scene of existence.” Prof. Nishi
speaks of this exact matter as “transference and countertransference” in psychoanalytic
relationships: “Transference can plunge a therapist into a helpless situation that differsfrom the one for which he or she had prepared.” The expressions that convey delicate
situations such as these are subtly different in English and Japanese. The subject in theJapanese sentence is “therapist,” and the intransitive verb “to fall into” is used. In thesentence that Prof. Nishi herself wrote in English, “transference” is the subject, and theline continues, “Transference can plunge (...).” Perhaps she was not satisfied by either
expression. Instead, she is probably thinking of a situation that bears both of these. The
word “helpless” has the aspect of passively being subjected to the influence of external
factors, where one suddenly finds oneself in a situation before one realizes, as well as
another aspect where the therapist involved intransitively inventing.
When it comes to psychoanalysis, this transference is treated with much importance.
If anything, “it is not an exaggeration to state that modern psychoanalysis aims to answer
the question of how these transferences can be facilitated and how one can survive them.”
This verb “survive” is remarkably interesting. When expressing this verb in Japanese,
Prof. Nishi uses the direct translation of “ikinobiru.” This is a word usage not found in
ordinary Japanese conversation. The expression “surviving human relationships” is odd
in Japanese; however, in this case, there does not appear to be any fitting expression otherthan this one. To talk about a sense of otherness which transcends ordinary senses, there
is a need to follow the trail of foreign expressions and use language that deviates from theordinary usage of our mother tongue.

2. Transference and Resistance: Otherness as Helplessness
Prof. Nishi states that “the psychoanalytic process will be adversely affected if thetherapists also play the role of an educator,” and many therapists seem to think this way.
Well, what is “the psychoanalytic process” in the first place? Prof. Nishi says plainly that
it is transference. Then, she introduces an interesting anecdote about Japanese pioneer of
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psychoanalysis, Heisaku Kosawa, and his protégé Seishi Shimoda, calling the episode“the event during which a transference had taken place,” and stating, “This is when
psychoanalytic development appears to have occurred”. Transference is “a helplesssituation that differs from the one for which he or she had prepared.”
The above episode can also be understood as a discrepancy in understanding that
arose from the process of analysis. Shimoda (the analysand) is unable to accept Kosawa’s(the analyst) interpretation. Perhaps losing his patience, Kosawa tried to demonstrate thecorrectness of his own interpretation, and scolded Shimoda, “blasting his voicethroughout the entire room.” However, Shimoda does not give way: “Dr. Kosawa, who
dismissed the notion of education without scolding, tried to change my mind by scoldingme, but I did not budge even an inch.” This is exactly the kind of battlefield scene thatplays out over transference and countertransference. The two of them fall into a helpless
relationship, as if they “had been thrown in and were drowning without noticing.”
However, naturally, “modern psychoanalysis aims to answer the question of how thesetransferences can be facilitated and how one can survive them.” This is the core of Prof.
Nishi’s understanding of psychoanalysis. On this point I agree. However, as a non-analyst,
I thought about the following issues, from the point of view of an observer.
How does an analyst facilitate transference? That is to say, the job of the analyst isto 1) before they realize it, 2) facilitate a situation with the client such that they seem tobe swallowed up by and are drowning in a helpless situation, and 3) to survive this. The
word “survive” expresses a compelling state of affairs, as seen above. However, what I
want to pay attention to here is the verb “facilitate.” Since this is meant to be facilitated
before one realizes it, it is not intentional. The English phrasing is “how thesetransferences can be facilitated,” and the causative meaning of facili-tate is not strong
here, but it is expected that the process will be heading in some direction. Or perhaps theanalyst faces the client so as not to obstruct the process that is supposed to arise inevitably
in the psychoanalytic relationship. In other words, they both head toward the helplesssituation and deepen the transference/countertransference relationship within that. Prof.
Britzman depicts such helpless situations as otherness, as well. In teaching–learning
relationships, this “otherness as helplessness” arises. It is unavoidable. However, Prof.
Britzman does not think of leveraging it. It would be preferable to avoid it, but since itcannot be avoided, the idea is to engage with it skillfully. On the other hand,
psychoanalysis requires this “otherness as helplessness.” Not only that, but
psychoanalysis tries to facilitate it. It tries to experience otherness together with the client,work through it, and then survive it. In short, these conversations intersect. School
teachers embrace “otherness as helplessness” between themselves and their students,
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even though it is not desirable, and somehow just barely survive that battlefield. In
contrast, analysts hope that such a situation will arise and stay by the side of their clients
while both sides survive that dense battlefield.
These two fields are different somehow, perhaps the things they hope for and expect
are different. However, on a profound level, they reverberate with each other. Bothteachers and analysts try to survive. Then, they see some kind of growth in that process.
Regarding the substance of that growth, teachers, and clients may have different pointsof view and assessments. They are different, but both recognize “otherness as
helplessness” within relationships between people, and I think that surviving this whilefeeling helpless or out of control, has some kind of important significance.
ResistanceIn this way, Prof. Britzman does not have the idea of “facilitating transference.”
There is no need to go out of their way to deliberately facilitate transference, it issomething which inevitably arises in the relationship between teacher and student.
Instead, she focuses on the resistance that arises in that relationship. In many cases, that
resistance arises unconsciously. Perhaps we could think that they do not notice it, but tobe precise, that would be the mechanism of repression. We pretend that there was neverany “otherness as helplessness,” or we forget about it. Prof. Britzman sees this tendency
in the classroom, especially on the teacher side. This is a tendency to unconsciously resist“otherness as helplessness.” Teachers have a tendency to defend against otherness.
Therefore, she recommends that teachers accept otherness. Of course, this is not easy. It
arouses both conscious and unconscious resistance. This is because teachers must thenrecognize that their own selves are torn. They must recognize that the integrity andcompleteness of their selves is broken, and admit the unknown, uncontrollable otherness
within themselves. Teachers cannot control themselves on their own. With this selfawareness in hand, they stand in front of students.
Incidentally, in this context, Prof. Britzman has the following to say about growth.
The acceptance of otherness changes one’s understanding of the concept of growth.
Growth carries with it potential, but it also has the power to cause disruption. Growthbrings about misalignment. Foreignness is uncanny. It perplexes, annoys, and confuses
people. To grow is to accept exactly such foreignness into oneself. In other words, itmeans transforming into something that is not the self: “The self is the stranger unto itself.”
If we think about it this way, growth is none other than the acceptance of that situation.
Prof. Britzman understands education as the business of accepting otherness as a stranger
into oneself. On this point, I completely agree with Prof. Britzman’s view.
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3. Nachträglichkeit: Otherness as the Unpredictable
Prof. Geshi discusses Nachträglichkeit in the following way. The meaning of anexperience is only understood afterward. In other words, it is a troublesome issue inwhich an experience is re-interpreted after an event has already happened. I learned theword Nachträglichkeit about 30 years ago, when I was thinking about field study
reflections. After going on a field trip with students, we came back to the classroom andhave time for reflections. In response to student impressions such as “I didn’t understandit at the time” and “I won’t understand it until I get a little distance and time,” I made thecounterargument that “Aren’t you adding a deferred embellishment?” and “Aren’t you
just attaching meaning to the event after it has occurred?” Nachträglichkeit is a word I
first learned about when making arguments such as these.
Prof. Geshi formulates this issue as follows: “Learning matters, which a child is notready to understand, are believed to act after the event” or “Past experiences of which
individuals are not aware, because they were, at one point, beyond the realm ofcomprehension, can eventually be understood by the occurrence of similar experiences
after going through puberty.” We might not understand something in the turmoil of anexperience, but we might only understand its meaning afterward. When I contemplated
this, the concept of the hermeneutic circle came to mind. But beyond that, I thought ofeschatology. To take a grand historical viewpoint, Nachträglichkeit has the same vector
as eschatology. Only after arriving at the end-times is the significance of all the history
leading up to that point revealed. In the end-times, even tragic events are shown to all
have been a part of God’s plan. In other words, it is a time vector of anticipating a future
point in time, and speaking in the perfect tense from a future point in time (its differenceswith the reincarnation time vector are a fascinating topic).
Prof. Geshi’s attempts focus on trying to apply this Nachträglichkeit in a positive
form. That is, its point of view is to reconstruct the deferred feeling that something went
well. If we can think that something went well after the event has been completed, thatwould mean we have succeeded. When we are experiencing something, we do not know
if the experience is “good” or “bad.” Only by being able to reflect back on something
having gone well afterward do we decide that it was “good.” However, the results are
unpredictable. While we are working on trying to bring about good results, we cannot
decide beforehand what must be done in order to obtain good results. We are placing abet. If the standards for what is seen as positive are decided afterward, even if we work
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with the thought that something is good, we cannot guarantee that the standards set
afterward will judge that work to have been good. Prof. Geshi thought of this kind ofgroundlessness of education as otherness. Education does not have a reliable foundation.
It is built on otherness. He took up the issue of how to approach that otherness.
By the way, it is precisely because Confucian wisdom understands this issue which
is why it constructed built a system of striking first and not permitting changes later on.
It is a system in which the successors are compelled to follow the same standards up to
the present day, and the standards have all been indicated in the founders’ ideology.
People must not destroy these standards, or deviate from them. It is a system that is passed
on to the next generation exactly as it was inherited from the previous generation. Seenfrom the perspective of this kind of cultural transmission (or emphasis on tradition),
Nachträglichkeit is a frame of mind that acknowledges changes. Even better, we could
say that it is a frame of mind that encourages new generations to take new ways ofviewing things. If that is the case, it would be an idea that falls under the same corollary
as the ideology of new education that has advocated for child-centered education.
Negative and Positive Aspects of Nachträglichkeit
Now, Freud also paid attention to Nachträglichkeit. However, Prof. Geshi’s
perspective is a different one. Freud highlighted the negative aspects of Nachträglichkeit.
What Freud thought of was a situation of falling into a more negative understanding
through deferred comprehension. This is the exact opposite of the hopes of eschatology;
it is a state of becoming more and more miserable by understanding something anew
after it has happened. Even though it would have been better to just forget, by stopping
for a moment and re-understanding afterward, one experiences darkness and uncovers
his or her dark side. In short, “it becomes a deferred trauma.” Freud himself thought that
this was a necessary process for psychoanalysis. For the sake of personality growth, onemust experience deferred understanding on at least one occasion. To be precise, Freudbelieved that in the protected transference/countertransference relationship of thepsychoanalytic relationship, confronting this dark side made people grow or at least
progress to the next step. If we think about it this way, Freud’s treatment theory also
included the potential to apply Nachträglichkeit in a positive way in the long run.
However, Freud did not advance the topic in that direction. Instead, he continued to focus
on the potential or danger in experiencing one’s negative dark side. It amounts to staying
in the dangerous realm that Prof. Britzman called “otherness” and Prof. Nishi called a“helpless situation.” Should we regard this dangerous realm as the core of education, or
as noise (or an obstacle or impediment)? It may be fine to understand this in various ways,
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but I will at least include that realm within the area of expertise of the word “education.”
That was the main focus of “An Educational Theory for Otherness” in Prof. Britzman’s
paper.
However, Prof. Geshi goes even further than this. It does not merely look atotherness. It attempts to look at the potential to apply otherness in a positive way. This is
the point of assessing something as good when looking back afterward. Rather thanseeing the negative aspects of Nachträglichkeit, as Freud does, he tries to see its positive
aspects; “If this transformation acts negatively, it becomes a disorder; however, if suchtransformation has a ‘positive’ effect, it can be deemed educational (i.e., a positive
traumatic experience).” This is, so to speak, “Beyond the Trauma Principle.” Prof. Geshi
experimentally brings up “education when reflected upon later.” In other words, it is anargument made in three steps, seen from Prof. Britzman’s line of thought toward
otherness. First, it considers otherness to be unpredictable. Second, it considers Freud’s
perspective on Nachträglichkeit. Third, it observes the positive aspects ofNachträglichkeit rather than its negative aspects. In this way, Prof. Geshi ultimately tries
to accept otherness as a positive thing, but nevertheless, what this inquiry digs up on its
way to reaching that point, is the profound difficulty of education’s groundlessness.
Education has no foundations. Education cannot be planned. This is because even if
we hope for better education, what is good is decided only after reflecting back on theevent. Thus, the standard for better itself does not hold. Only when we reflect back does
education become valid as education. If that is the case, teachers cannot judge whether
their work is a form of good education at the point in time when they are working on theirstudents. There is nothing to guarantee that what one is doing will be for the sake of theother person. There is no guarantee that either way that one will be thanked, or criticized,
when looking back afterward. Furthermore, at what point in time will students reflect
back? Their evaluation of the effect of education will change depending on its time. If
that is the case, the standards are completely fluid. The assessment standards are not only
“relative” but also “relativistic.” If we think about it this way, we end up with theconclusion that no matter what we do, it is all the same. We cannot help but fall into
relativism, skepticism, nihilism, and finally populism of finding futility even if we strive.
I am apprehensive about the argument advancing in that direction. Perhaps Prof. Geshi isalso trying out a theoretical dispute for that inclination.
The business of education has an aspect of “only understanding its significancewhen reflecting about it later in time”. Therefore, there are no foundations, no guarantees
in education. In spite of having shared that reality, how much courage to educate can wehave? Prof. Geshi, who saw a link between psychoanalysis and education in the concept
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of Nachträglichkeit, is trying to hold out for the courage to educate in a tight space byhighlighting aspects of that concept that were different from Freud’s thinking.

4. What is the “Acceptance of Otherness”?
By setting otherness as a keyword, a great many fascinating discussions and topics
arise in the themes of psychoanalysis and education. While reading the papers of thepresenters, I thought of the following two topics.
On Trusting
The first topic is about the meaning of “accepting” in the context of accepting
otherness. Prof. Britzman emphasizes that otherness threatens the self. Otherness issomething that antagonizes the self. Otherness confronts the self, and amounts to amenace to the self. In spite of this, she wants people to accept it. However, doesn’t
otherness also have a complementary role for the self? In other words, doesn’t itsometimes also function in a positive way for the self?
For example, Jungian psychology puts confidence in unconscious energy. Above all,in the individuation process, the analyst trusts otherness, and recommends that the client
leave things up to it. Does the word “accept” also include these meanings? That is to say,is the acceptance of otherness the reluctant acceptance of something hostile, or does theconcept instead include the idea of trusting otherness? In Prof. Nishi’s discussion, when
she mentions “facilitating transference,” does that include trusting the otherness thatarises there? Under the appropriate conditions, can we expect that it is alright to trust the
helpless and uncontrolled things that arise, as is bound to happen? Since this is a processthat occurs inevitably, does this mean that it is alright to leave everything up to otherness?
This is also related to Prof. Geshi’s argument. He saw hope in the potential for
Nachträglichkeit to operate positively. Can we consider this to mean trusting inotherness? Or is it impossible to declare trust after all? Is accepting an ambivalent event
premised on the presence of resistance? In this way, we are faced with the necessity of
digging into this concept and examining what “accepting” really means. Furthermore,
what is the subject of the verb “accept”? Is the subject “the ego” or is it “consciousness”
or “the subject,” or is it “the self, including the unconscious”? Not to mention, if we
include the perspective that the subject will change, the discussion gets even more
complicated.

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Otherness and “Mu” (Nothing, Zero, Empty)
The second topic is about the link between otherness and Eastern philosophy.
Japanese philosopher Toshihiko Izutsu understood such otherness as non-articulation.
Properly speaking, he understood the self as articulation, and otherness as nonarticulation. To put it more precisely, he understood the opposition of the self and theother as one phase of a grand framework of articulation and non-articulation. Eastern
philosophy called the extreme end of this non-articulation “Mu (nothing, zero, empty).”
Furthermore, Eastern philosophy has clarified aspects in which “Mu” works on “Yū(existence)” in negative and de-constructive ways, and aspects in which it works inpositive and re-constructive ways. If we think about it from the perspective of otherness,this means that both the aspects in which the otherness works on the self in negative andde-constructive ways, and the aspects in which it works in positive and re-constructive
ways, have both been clarified.
When we consider the issue from the perspective of Eastern philosophy, otherness
is understood as one phase of “Mu.” To put it the other way, this means that when we
examine Eastern philosophy with modern language, the concept of otherness becomes avaluable clue. In this way, the word “otherness” is a promising intermediary between
psychoanalysis and Eastern philosophy. The “acceptance of otherness” is an importantresearch topic. It has the potential to become a new ontological epistemology that will
enable an understanding of “education” that differs from modern education. I hope that
discussions of otherness will trigger the opening up of new alternatives in the context ofmodern education.

Symposium: Psychoanalysis and Education: Freudian Thought as an Educational Theory