Facing Aggression in the Pedagogical Relationship: Lessons from Fencing and Psychoanalysis (2005)

When I was a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, I learned from my parents what was acceptable and unacceptable in our home. One message I received among many was clear: anger, yelling, fighting, and even disagreements were forbidden. Voices were never raised in anger under any circumstances in our home. A glance, a gesture, a symbol were all used to reinforce a strict policy of peace at any cost. Perhaps because my parents were radically committed to the peace movement, for a while members of the Communist Party, or perhaps because of overdetermined patterns of relating to one another, anger was simply not allowed. However, there was one place where the expression of aggression was allowed, where it was acceptable, and even applauded: athletics. I knew in sports I was free to be as openly aggressive as I wanted to be. And the sport I chose to pursue as a young man, the sport that allowed me to express my unacknowledged and unconscious aggression was fencing. I understand today that fencing, along with lengthy analysis and analytic training, eventually allowed me to face and hold those aggressive impulses, impulses directed both toward others and myself. More important I can now see how fencing and my psychoanalytic work provided insight into teaching, for teaching is, as I shall argue in this paper, a relationship shot through with aggression. Furthermore, I would suggest that in order for a teacher to be present to his or her students, in order for a teacher to be wide-awake or mindful of the students, that teacher must acknowledge, understand and be able to hold her or his own aggressive impulses as well as those of the students. It took me a long time to come to such an understanding. I certainly didn't have it when I began to study fencing. Thirty-two years ago, on a damp October evening, I stood outside the large iron gates of the Institut National des Sports (INS) in Paris. I had in my hand a telegram from the director of the Ecole d'Escrime stating that I, a twenty-two year old American, having just graduated college and having rarely, other than to attend college, been out of the borough of Brooklyn, had been accepted into their two-year course of study. As if I were a character in some ancient Greek myth, I was led through those iron gates by an old man, who simply gestured for me to follow. Once inside I would really begin my studies in the art of fencing, what traditionally referred to as the dance of swords, and what I have come to think of as a dialogue between bodies. I would begin to understand what it means to talk of an activity as an art yet an activity that not explicitly aesthetic, what it means to be radically present in the moment, and how goals and aims must be bracketed, unconscious aggression acknowledged and affect noted, if one to fruitfully read and fully engage in the immediacy of intersubjective life. Only much later would I come to think back through such understandings in terms of my own teaching and theory of pedagogy. Given the etymology of the English word 'fence' with connotations of defense, fortification, protection, and security and the word's obvious denotation of fighting with swords, it may seem strange that I would find in my experiences as a competitive fencer and teacher of fencing, metaphors and modes of attunement that offer educators a particular way of being present to their students. I would suggest, however, that it the very acceptance of aggression in fencing that in part allows fencers, and I shall argue, can allow teachers to be more fully present to their students and to themselves. As both participant and observer, the fencer engages or connects with his or her opponent in their ongoing dance. The fencer who caught up in the fear of defeat, the narcissistic wounds of losing, or the lure of knowing who one is and who one's opponent is more apt to strike blindly or wildly, allowing aggression to triumph. …