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Concealments and Revealments of Metaphor, Love, and Aggression: Psychoanalytic Notes on the Emotional Life of Teacher Education

When educating preservice teachers, I often describe how on certain days the feelings they will have toward their students can be called nothing other than hatred,1 which runs against the assumed obligation in teaching to love at all costs, and to likewise overcome those feelings that may be perceived as antithetical to such a pursuit. For psychoanalytic theory, however (which I reference throughout this article), our emotional lives are structured by an utter, irresolvable ambivalence: “The simultaneous existence of contradictory tendencies, attitudes or feelings,” which implies “the coexistence of love and hate” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 26). Though we may hope to hold hate in abeyance and only allow for loving conditions, such states of absolute suspension are simply unachievable; for wherever there is love—and the profession of teaching is certainly filled with love—there is also always the possibility of its opposite. In this article, I explore the symbolization of such ambivalence, interpreting the play of words employed by a group of preservice teachers. Following Taubman (2012), I take up psychoanalytic theory as a way to “work on the border between the socio/cultural and the intrapsychic, [to] explore the mysteries of subjectivity, and [to] illuminate the dreams, desires, ideals, and terrors that shape our understanding of education” (p. 2). Most importantly, however, I turn to the interpretive language of psychoanalysis for the ways it interrupts “education’s dream of mastery” (Britzman, 1998, p. 10), and to help us understand those secret places where the borderlines of conscious intention and unconscious desire are never so easily secured. In my readings of the words of others, I also acknowledge the impossibility and interminability of final interpretations; as Felman (1987) describes, for psychoanalytic theory, there is always an awareness “that the last word . . . has