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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: August 1, 2004
Reviewed:
Latest Update: August 7, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Love and Hate in in the Working Relationships of Professionals

1. Introduction Why I chose to share this reading.
2. Focus: Main point of this reading.
3. Reading Full identification of source for reading AND excerpt.
4. Concepts: Concepts and Key Words.
5. Discussion Discussion questions.
6. Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses What this has to do with our class.

* * *

Introduction:

• This reading is a fairly sophisticated analysis of love and hate in professional relationships. It comes out the psychoanalytic literature. But teaching is very much like therapy: offering someone else the tools by which to analyze and understand their choices, and keeping clearly in mind that you must not overstep the boundary of substituting your will for theirs. Reeder's work is important, and I believe it's important for all of us as teachers, as parents, as friends and colleagues, to consider the love/hate aspects of our inter-relationships.

Focus:

• I'd like you to come away from this reading with a sense that love and hate permeate our lives and all of our choices, and require an awareness of who we are, and what values we want to project through our relationships with Others.

Concepts and Key Words:

• superego:

• prescriptive role: a role that provides rules for how you ought to behave or what you ought to do. We would refer to these as affirmative rules

• prohibitive role: a role that provides rules for what you ought not do. For example, anything that exerts dominant control over the Other in your charge, as patient, as student, as believer, would not be acceptable withn your professional role. Such dominant control would be referred to as "coercion."

• laying on of alternatives: confusing our needs, values, and alternatives with those available to the Other. The phrase comes from the Bishops' laying on of hands. I use the phrase because I like the quasi-religious connotation. It goes with the unstated assumption that I can judge what your world is like because I know what mine is like, and mine is the focus of my universse.

Reading:

• Hate and Love in Psychoanalytical Institutions

  Emphasis added.

  "Other Press is pleased to announce the publication of Hate and Love in Psychoanalytical Institutions: The Dilemma of a Profession, by Jurgen Reeder

  "In Hate and Love in Psychoanalytic Institutions, Jurgen Reeder investigates the professional superego of the psychoanalyst. This superego designates a prescriptive and prohibiting role that the individual must play within the parameters of a certain occupational sphere.

  "The prescriptive aspect works like a professional ideal, and in this respect the superego can be said to sustain a professional "ethos" or spirit, commanding what the professional should know, and what his or her relations to clients and colleagues should resemble. It helps to bind the members of the analytical community together.

  "The prohibiting aspect installs a vigilant inner eye. It offers necessary protection against detrimental aberrations, but it also evokes fantasies of critical or condemning colleagues who might have insight into what transpires within the walls of the analyst's own private practice--leading to a reluctance to communicate openly about the analytical experience. In this sense, the professional superego contributes to the "paranoization" of collegial communication, a circumstance that has a hampering effect on spontaneity and creativity in both clinical and theoretical work.

  "Jurgen Reeder's groundbreaking research, uncovering the dynamics of the professional superego in psychology, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis, can be applied to other professions as well, including social work, medicine, education, law, and the ministry. (Emphasis added.)

  Praise for Hate and Love in Psychoanalytical Institutions:

  “ 'This is an important book. It concerns how the psychoanalytic system of education affects psychoanalytic institutes and organizations, and, conversely, how the organization functions as a conservative agent against amendments of the education system. […] While Reeder's theme is the noxious role that hatred plays in our institutions, his book is written with love for psychoanalysis.' ”
  -Anders Zachrisson, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

  “ 'I would strongly recommend all psychoanalysts to read this book of Jurgen Reeder, which is a serious, thought provoking, thorough and very comprehensive account of psychoanalytic education, its history, its practice, the different functions of personal versus training analysis, didactic training and supervision.' ”
  -Imre Szecsödy MD. Ph.D. training analyst at the Swedish Psychoanalytic Society

Discussion Questions:

1. We are used to thinking of constraints in the behavior of psychoanalysts and counselors. Why does this topic arise in education?

   Consider that the teacher represents "received authority," and consider the coercive power of authority. If you are interested in this aspect of the issue, read Power Goes to School by John Covaleskie.

Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses:

• Agencies:
  Sample linking: Workers in agencies have disciplinary power which is exerted over those they serve. Sometimes they forget they serve, and hate wins over love. The issues raised by this reading are meant to raise our awareness of the love/hate relationships in our work.

• Criminal Justice:
  Sample linking: Criminal justice involves the power to judge the Other. That entails enormous temptation to transfer feelings of anger and frustration to that Other over whom the system has granted you power. Certainly loving the other in criminal justice doesn't mean emptying all the prisons, but it does mean an awareness over own love/hate conflicts so that we do not unduly lay our alternatives on the Other.

• Law:
  Sample linking: Extent to which laws are made on the assumption that we are all essentially assimilated to the dominant culture. How does this reading help us see the need for contextual readings in law? How does it relate to our natural instincts to seek some kind of natural law? What facts and principles does the reading offer for discourse that could clarify for Others validity claims presented by an Obscure Other?

• Moot Court:
  Sample linking: Ways in which to make validty claims of harm understood by those who have never experienced many of the world's different perspectives. How can this reading enlighten our praxis in terms of different kinds of discourse, like instrumental, illocutionary, governance?

• Women in Poverty:
  Sample linking: The culture of poverty and assimilation. How does the reading deal with our underlying assumptions about poverty, especially poverty of the exploited, the NOT- male? What does the reading suggest of the interrelationship between our society and its children, generally cared for by women, often poor?

• Race, Gender, Class:
  Sample linking: The extent to which silence has been imposed by these affiliations so that domination and discrimination have entered our unstated assumptions in interpersonal relations and the structural context arising from them. What does the reading tell us about exploitation and alternative ways to deal with one another? What does it tell us about institutionalized -isms and our denial of complicity? What does it tell us about our common humanity?

• Religion:
  Sample linking: The spiritual component. Humans are spiritual creatures, creatures that recognize moments that go beyond ourselves to God, Allah, Isis, Gaia, the Universe, or a deep sense of responsibility to create our own meanng. How does the reading fit into our ability, our need to create such meaning in life?

• Love !A:
  Sample linking: What's the aesthetic link in this reading? How does it bring us closer to one another as humans? What does it tell us about our need for love, unconditional love, not rewards for doing well or being well, but caring and acceptance for being who we are?