Today, psychoanalysis looks back on a long-lasting tradition of impacting educational theory and practice. In fact, from its very inception psychoanalytic thinking has been applied to educational settings (e.g., Freud, 1914; Freud, 1960). However, despite a long and very rich tradition, psychoanalysis in education remains a niche area in educational research and practice in Europe (Taubman, 2011). In academia, it has been almost entirely pushed out of the mainstream of educational research, with the exception of special needs education.
In this presentation, we argue that today there is an opportunity opening up for psychoanalytic thinking to (re-)emerge from the margins of educational research and practice. In the course of the past two decades, there has been a growing acknowledgment that social-emotional learning and development is a crucial part of a modern educational experience (CASEL, 2023), and an essential precondition for more effective academic/cognitive learning, and the advancement of meta-cognitive skills (Pianta, 2012). At the same time, meta-analyses of social-emotional learning/development program evaluations, based on theories and methods of the educational sciences’ mainstream, show only small effects (Corcoran et al., 2018). From a psychoanalytic perspective this is hardly surprising, because most of these programs resort to behavioral condition strategies that ignore latent/unconscious factors impacting human development. Hence, an opportunity is opening up for psychoanalysis in education to show that it can deliver better results.
However, in order to be successful, psychoanalysis in education needs to accept the methods and quality standards, which currently dominate the mainstream of educational sciences, despite their obvious limitations. Specifically, psychoanalysis in education needs to work with and show appreciation for the methods and contributions of quantitative empiricism with its focus on social ecological factors impacting development, and integrate them – which is not the same as giving up its traditional focus on qualitative and in-depth analyses of the unconscious. Initial successful and encouraging steps in this direction have been made in clinical psychoanalysis (Fonagy & Bateman, 2013).
This presentation focuses on our first attempts to bridge the gap between psychoanalysis in education and quantitative empiricism in educational research and practice. From our point of view, group analysis (Foulkes, 1983; Bion, 1991), which combines psychoanalytic and social-ecological/sociological theory and thinking, is the best-suited practice and methods framework for this endeavor. In early 2022, we began working as group analytic coaches in schools. Specifically, we have provided group analytic supervision sessions in two schools in the greater Berlin metropolitan area. In the course of this work, we have also developed a new student survey instrument, which has been theoretically derived from psychoanalytic and group analytic theory (e.g., Hirblinger, 2017; Naumann, 2014). The purpose of this instrument is to support teachers' self-reflective practices in the context of group analytic school coaching and professional development training.
