“A propos du fondamentalisme: quelques remarques sur l’Un et l’autre", Mme Paloa Mieli
Lors d'une manifestation anti-américaine au Bangladesh en octobre 2001, les manifestants brandissaient de grandes affiches de soutien à Oussama ben Laden. Certaines de ces affiches montraient Ben Laden avec, au fond, derrière son épaule gauche, la marionnette Bert, célèbre Pour son Rôle dans Sesame Street, La série télévisée Américaine pour jeunes enfants diffusée avec succès depuis 1969. Cette association causa stupeur et perplexité : l'ennemi public numéro un du monde occidental était représenté avec un personnage pour enfants très populaire dans les médias américains, porte-parole, précisément, des valeurs de ce monde. Lire la suite
Lynn Gamwell : Sigmund Freud’s Antiquities Collection
Freud began collecting Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities in the 1890s. In this lithograph, he is shown in 1914 at his desk, surrounded by about a dozen figurines. When he began collecting, he also began making an analogy between archeology and psychoanalysis, both reconstructions of the past from buried fragments: “Thus it came about, that in this, the first full-length analysis of hysteria undertaken by me, that I arrived at a procedure . . . of clearing away psychological material layer by layer, and we like to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city” (“Studies in Hysteria,” 1895). Lire la suite
Pau Fry : Freud and education
Leaving aside the university tradition that descends from Humboldt, there are two American “philosophies” of school education, one rooted in Plato and one in Locke. As a matter of recent history, the former dominated the Aquarian ‘sixties and ‘seventies as a “classroom without walls” designed to “e-duce” or draw forth presumably pre-existing knowledge from students through the empowering agencies of participation and creativity. This philosophy of education survives even today in the emphasis the education manuals place on the “socratic seminar.” But in the period since the ‘seventies, in a backlash so pervasive that it’s the one thing the Left and Right can agree on (when it comes to pronouncements on education there’s little difference between Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump)—in this period, our age of Tests, Standards, and Core Curricula, what has come to dominate once again is the notion that a student’s mind is a blank wax tablet on which necessary information must be imprinted. This latter model views teachers the same way: they are constantly tested and subjected to competition, and even their daily lesson plans are—in a tellingly Lockeian expression— “scripted” for them. The main practical reason why both these viewpoints seem so inadequate is that as far as they go one of them best serves half the classroom and the other best serves the other half. In psychoanalytic terms, students for whom. Lire la suite