Affective Flows in the Clinic and the Classroom

• In Event: The Affective Turn in Literacy Research: Theories, Potentials, Difference

Abstract

In this paper, the author compares her recent and on-going experiences of learning to be a psychotherapist to her work as a classroom teacher and teacher educator to highlight the struggles and potentials of affect, desire and demand as they move between adult and child in both the teaching and therapeutic relationship. Drawing on the author’s research into Felix Guattari’s practices as a clinical psychotherapist, Jonathan Wyatt’s reflections on the implications of Karen Barad’s work for his clinical practice, and others, the author considers the role of affective intensities and flows in clinical sessions and supervision and will draw lines from that work to the work of teaching children in classrooms. The question of what it might do to be in different kinds of relationship with children is perhaps the central question of psychotherapy, almost regardless of the school of thought in which one is trained.

The author uses sketches loosely based in her clinical practice along with descriptions of how some psychoanalytic researchers talk about what it is that matters in the therapeutic relationship. She brings these into conversation with the research of Akiko Hayashi and Joseph Tobin (2015) about how experienced Japanese teachers think about the complexities of teaching relationships. She also brings in Deleuzo-Guattarian theory, which allows different lines of flight in her thinking. She does this in the Deleuzo-Guattarian (1987) spirit of the and… and… and…, by which she means creating an assemblage in which the individual pieces maintain their integrity but that, when brought together, also create something new. The paper performs something about how the teacher-therapist assemblage enlivens her thinking about each, and her expectation is that the reader will do the same with the experience of reading the paper alongside her/his own experiences, thinking, imagination, and desires.

Author

• Gail M. Boldt, The Pennsylvania State University