A Note on Free Association as Transference to Reading

• In Event: Reading Critical Pedagogies: Reading Paulo Freire

Abstract

Would it be so far afield to relate with Paulo Freire’s, “The Importance of the Act of Reading” and his return to “the most remote experiences of childhood” (5) to that of a psychoanalyst’s interest in taking and listening in on a case history? And given that Freire mainly wished to comment on the significance of reading to his own life and to his pedagogical approach, might I, too, take a chance and freely associate to signs along the way, including the question, why is there a desire to read? In making these questions as my case, might I too search for lost traces of the long-ago time of childhood and link this prehistoric past to my commitments to protecting the life of the mind today? Might I, too, narrate the transference, both positive and negative, both with love and hate, to what has become my education? And, if I can do that, would I then open a new reading, a new world, and a new approach to old and seemingly intractable conflicts? Might I too find the idea that what reading teaches is that nothing is what it seems to be, that reality too must pass through my subjective world, and give allowance to that mental paradox that we read for what cannot be seen but can be still be imagined?
Sigmund Freud has made the argument that our earliest memories involve two nearly opposing experiences: the actual and the imagined. He described this complex as “screen memories” where a fragment of one event is displaced from the original scene and projected onto another later event. It was his way to answer the common questions of why people tend to remember irrelevant things, why people idealize a past never experienced, and why memory and forgetting are two sides of the same coin. The feeling of an event persists but the historical event is subject to the ravages of time, fractured and displaced. Freud compared approaching psychical life, or taking a case history, to an archeological dig. While today’s scientific instruments might aid in clarifying the time, date, and place of an object, the same cannot be said of human feelings and the traces that return at a moment, say when staring out of one’s window and hallucinating a decaying book still there on the roof. I would have to say that reading is not only an interpretive act. It is also the way the mind functions to receive, find and create the inner and outer world. There is something before interpretation and it has to do with the act of becoming absorbed and lost in the other’s words. Reading is like taking a case history. The details slowly become a story of revision. Reading is an act of identification and imagination for, after all, words must signify what is no longer there and in reading, we are able to associate with absence, a general principle for the capacity for symbolization.

Author

• Deborah Britzman, York University