Category Gross

Teacher of Bad Film 2: Pedagogy

Otto Gross – pedagogy as Nebenzimmererotik: a rival cure for mimetic ailments.  

The reconstruction of the American soul: an interview with Professor Lance Duerfahrd (part 1)

(For the “Prologue” to this post please see Teacher of Bad Film 1.)

I’ll state this: pedagogy does not make room for the unconscious.

Otto Gross refers in a 1913 text to the asexuality of pedagogy, by which he means the exclusion of the bourgeois child from experience, from “Erleben”: from experiencing but also from undergoing, from living.  Gross traces the anti-experiential bias to the original bourgeois divisions, to the insistence on separate (homo-)sexual identities.  As the sexual roles between husband and wife (exclusive and coerced) are strictly regimented, the child’s role is that of a third party, the being on the side, split off from Erleben.  Thus banned from the parental bedroom, in all the senses you wish that to mean, it condemns the child to a substitute, a represented life, a Nebenzimmererotik: the eros of the adjoining room.  The child is to remain the eternal spectator, never participating, meaning never creating.  Education is to continue the isolation of the child by taking over the principle of fragmentation of the family: “Beziehungslosigkeit zum Kind, insofern das Kind am Erleben nicht teilnehmen darf (Nebenzimmererotik), sofern er erzogen werden soll (die geltenden pädagogischen Grundsätze streben zur Asexualität).”   Prevailing pedagogical principles stipulate asexuality: there is to be no experience in education.  Representation and education, insofar as both exclude the lived happening in favor of an image, are no longer separate and are meant to cement the child’s identity.(1)

Both film viewing and psychoanalysis have a rival in education.  If we feel we know what a film review is describing, it’s because we were taught how, by reading, to agree (or to recognize but recognizing means agreeing).  If education teaches us how to forget what we went through, it’s because pedagogy cannot deal with – in the

Teacher of Bad Film 1: Prologue

The experiences of cinema and psychoanalysis. Wartime. The mechanical ear of the analyst. Bion dreaming, buffalo running.

For a film goer to talk about a film they just saw – to truly talk about it: to account for their own experience of a film could be as difficult, or more, as talking in a psychoanalytic session.

Insofar as having an experience means communicating it to others – to oneself, included – can the film goer who, for a reason to be determined, wants to talk about it use an analyst to work him through a film or does he need to be taught how to recount an experience?

“Is there an analyst the filmgoer can see, a class they can take?” means: are analysis – itself, like film-going, a mimetic activity – and pedagogy – too overwhelmed or taken by the conscious and the normative – in a position not to see art as a rival human expression that can or must be spoken away? At their most dogmatic, both propose to cure the mimetic rival. At their most receptive, are they able to not bypass the question of art?

The French director Bruno Dumont says that cinema viewing is about confrontation and identification: it confronts us with ourselves – even though we seem to be taking in a spectacle – because we fill in what we think we, objectively, see. This strikes me as a complex argument but evident, once we allow ourselves to think it through, and, above all, imag

Les plus consultés

Pourquoi la psychanalyse risque-t-elle de disparaître du Luxembourg ?A Dangerous MethodLa psychanalyse existeComment naissent les maladies mentales ?