The Psychodynamics of the College Classroom

In a recent essay entitled “Are You My Mother?” Merve Emre, a frequent New Yorker contributor and a professor of creative writing and criticism at Wesleyan University, argues that it’s impossible to understand the dynamics of the contemporary college classroom without understanding the extent to which the psychoanalytic concepts of transference and countertransference are at play.

Transference and countertransference—the redirection of emotions originally felt in childhood to a surrogate—can be seen in the tendency of undergraduates and graduate students to treat a professor as a “mother, father, sibling, best friend, therapist, priest, idol, [or] nemesis.”

We know that transference and countertransference can play a critical role in education. In a provocative 2007 American Scholar essay on the erotics of teaching, William Deresiewicz argues that “the good teacher raises in students a burning desire for his or her approval and attention, his or her voice and presence, that is erotic in its urgency and intensity.”

Deresiewicz’s point is that in a society that lacks a language to understand an intimacy that is neither familial nor carnal, the intellectual intensity of the teacher-student relationship is reduced, in popular culture, to the pompous pedant abusing his authority to extract sex. We’re all familiar with faculty members who exploit students’ crushes or infatuations. Perhaps you recall the 2008 Ben Kingsley–Penelope Cruz drama Elegy, based upon Philip Roth’s 2001 novel The Dying Animal, a poignant take on the slimy, lustful, predatory professorial lothario.

Emre’s argument is that the student-faculty relationship has undergone a profound change in recent years, most noticeably at the nation’s elite campuses. These students are far more likely to challenge their professors—to openly question their “test questions, classroom exercises, grading and accommodation policies, student feedback, course content, [and] off-the-cuff jokes”—and accuse them of inflicting harm or trauma and failing to provide an appropriate level of care or accommodation.  

Emre argues that highly fraught student-faculty interactions arise when, in the student’s eyes, “authority figures fail to live up to the fantasies or expectations projected onto them.” Of course, enmeshed relationships in the college classroom are nothing new. Adulation and idolization were part of the faculty-student relationship in the past (remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when a student inscribes “Love You” on her eyelids?), as were their mirror image: anxiety, anger, antagonism and resentment. But something new is at work, Emre insists.

First of all, students who have been praised all their lives as especially gifted and accomplished expect their professors to reaffirm and reinforce their inflated self-image. Any criticism, no matter how well intended, is intolerable.

Then, too, many students at elite institutions feel an extreme sense of entitlement, not just to high grades, but to whatever accommodations they consider appropriate.  

In addition, power and control no longer reside with the faculty member or vulnerability with the student. Many professors, who live in terror that a single accusation of insensitivity or toxicity could derail their career or permanently besmirch their reputation, take steps to distance themselves from their students. Paranoia, suspicion and distrust color the professor-student relationship in ways that weren’t true in the past.

We might attribute this new dynamic, in part, to the way that today’s students were raised. They’re the products of a particular kind of family unit, an intense, inward-turning emotional hothouse in which hovering, highly demanding tiger parents live through their children, imposing and internalizing punishing expectations for achievement. In consequence, privileged students treat the classroom like a therapy session and expect their professors to provide the level of care, attention and affection that they sought, but failed to receive, from their parents. When students direct highly charged words like “exploitative,” “harmful,” “toxic,” “triggering” or “traumatic” at their instructors, they are engaging in countertransference.

At the same time, a discourse of psychic harm, the emotional distress and psychological damage that can be inflicted by insensitive language, microaggressions and the refusal to respect people’s dignity or validate their subjective emotions and perceptions and self-understanding, has entered into the classroom. This has led some instructors to avoid certain hot topics and tiptoe around difficult conversation and confrontations. If, on the one hand, there’s a tendency to regard today’s students as fragile flowers and delicate snowflakes, there’s also a reluctance to deal with students who push boundaries. Grade inflation is one result.

The classroom has, then, become a seething cauldron of heated emotions in which students work out their ambivalence toward their parents. If that argument sounds familiar, it is very similar to the much-criticized claims made by the sociologists Lewis S. Feuer and Neil Smelser: that the student activists of the 1960s were engaged in an intergenerational Oedipal revolt against their own fathers.

Even though I’m wary of overly psychologizing classroom interactions and student-faculty dynamics that can be understood in much simpler terms, I must add this: faculty need to become much more attentive to the relational and emotional aspects of classroom teaching. In addition to being attuned to issues involving transference and countertransference, professors need to be become more sensitive to other aspects of classroom dynamics, above all, issues of power and authority. Shielding our eyes to the dynamics of the contemporary classroom will not make those tensions go away.

What, then, is to be done?

1. Don’t wait for problems to erupt. Be proactive. Build relationships with your students before any concerns arise or problems mount. When rapport is good, problems tend to fade away. When rapport is bad, even a minor issue can escalate into a major problem.
2. Engage in an honest discussion with your students about your role and responsibilities. Be clear: You are not their mommy or daddy. You are not their friend (however approachable you might be). Nor are you their nemesis. Your job is to prod, instruct, guide, mentor and evaluate. We all, I suspect, crave our students’ admiration, even their adoration. My advice: get a cat or dog.
3. Openly discuss your grading policy. Be explicit about your policies about attendance and participation and extensions. Be clear about whether improvement counts. Consider working with your students to develop a grading rubric for essays. I don’t think grading needs to be mechanical to be fair. But your approach does need to be radically transparent.
4. Take steps to make the classroom a place of trust and collegiality. It’s essential to create an educational environment and classroom culture that isn’t adversarial, antagonistic, competitive, conflict-laden and suspicious but is, instead, supportive, encouraging and forward-looking. Engage your students in a discussion about classroom civility.
5. Be extremely sensitive to a classroom’s power dynamics. Power in today’s classroom comes from many directions. Just as instructors mustn’t intimidate students, we mustn’t let classmates scare, browbeat or bully one another. Don’t let those students who are most articulate with the theories or discourses du jour overawe or put off their peers.
6. Be acutely attentive to students’ insecurities, attitudes and perspectives. To the extent possible, get to know your students as individuals. If the class is small enough, meet one-on-one with them. If it isn’t, arrive in class early and stick around and engage students in conversation. I, for one, have conducted anonymous surveys as a way to learn more about where my students are coming from.
7. Share classroom authority. Give students the opportunity to introduce the class, lead discussions and summarize the points covered during the class session. Ask students to research a key topic and share their findings in class. Also, give students opportunities to share their opinions and personal experience. You might also let students suggest examination questions.
8. Encourage multiple perspectives. For example, in discussing a text, ask your students to:
   • Interpret a reading through contrasting lenses—critical race theory, feminist, Freudian, Marxist or postmodern.
   • Describe the political or ideological system of beliefs values and ideas that underlie the text.
   • Explain why the text tells us about the human condition, about human nature or love or families or growing up.
   • Examine how the author uses language, style, tone and characterization to engage and manipulate the reader.
   • Explore what the text says about certain cultural assumptions, about femininity or masculinity, whiteness or Blackness, civilization or nature, race or class and whether the text supports the dominant views of its time or subverts them.
   • Assess how different reader, depending on their race, class, ethnic identity or sexuality, might read and experience the text. Make it clear that your classroom welcomes multiple interpretations and points of view.
9. Remember: ultimately, you are in charge. In the final analysis, you, as instructor, are responsible for your classroom’s climate and culture. You need to make students feel comfortable about sharing their thoughts. Rather than putting students on the spot, you might divide the class into small breakout sections or summarize (anonymously) the ideas that individual students expressed in their essays or response papers.

Bear in mind postmodern and constructivist understandings of power. Power in the classroom is not unidirectional or unilateral. It’s not held by a single person, the instructor. It can be exerted “invisibly”: through language, demeanor and embedded assumptions. It’s mutually constructed, relational and the product of negotiation. Therefore, it’s best to “share power with students, use indirect discourse and give students choices in their learning can more efficiently get their students to engage in the tasks they design to promote student learning.”

The classroom ought not to be confused with a T-Group, sensitivity training, an encounter group, a struggle session or group therapy. Psychodrama, the acting out of conflict and traumatic experiences, is best left to practicing psychologists in a professional setting. And yet, instructors have something to learn from those groups, with their emphasis on personal growth, self-expression and the value of openness and honesty.

In 1969, the organizational theorist Karl E. Weick introduced the idea of sensemaking to describe a collaborative process through which a group constructs a framework for interpretation and mutual understanding.

That’s precisely the process that a humanities or social science class should engage in. At its best, the humanities and the social sciences classrooms are emotionally intense environments where intellectual combat rages and disagreements over interpretation thrive—all in the interest of enhancing our understanding of a text, an idea or concept, an event, a question or a creative work.

The humanities and social sciences classrooms are fragile spaces where the sensemaking process can easily go awry. It’s extraordinarily vulnerable to disruption, now more than ever. But at its best, it’s a model of collective intellectual engagement in pursuit of a common goal—to listen, explore, argue, share and make sense of complicated realities.

At a moment when the idea of the synchronous, in-person, face-to-face classroom is increasingly written off as outmoded relic of the past that is grossly unfair to those learners with competing obligations, we need to reaffirm its value and recognize that true learning is a shared, interactive process where ideas are tested, questioned and contested.