Transference, Anxiety, and Defenses

If defense mechanisms generally inhibit learning, then learning (both individually and collectively) requires a certain type of psychological work in identifying, accepting, and tolerating the anxieties that it creates. Some of these anxieties may be triggered by earlier experiences of failure and disappointment or by threatening feelings of uncertainty, dependency, and vulnerability. Thus, learning is no spontaneous unleashing of potential but involves overcoming resistances to learning, many of which operate in unconscious and unacknowledged ways. One particular source of unconscious resistance to learning lies in each individual’s narcissistic belief that he or she is already perfect and therefore needs no development or change (Freud, 1914/1984). Another source of resistance lies in the conviction that the individual knows what he/she needs to learn and nothing beyond it is necessary or desirable. Learning represents a challenge and a threat to all of us, endangering some valued ideas, habits, and beliefs about self and others and generating an unavoidable degree of discomfort or even pain.

For these reasons, psychodynamic writers pay great attention to early life learning experiences, its excitements and disappointments, which color subsequent learning in schools, universities, and, more generally, organizations. Learning is facilitated by an agent of learning, a parent, an older sibling, a teacher, who represents a figure of authority; this figure is in later life replaced by a leader, teacher, mentor, consultant, or clinician, who acts as the force facilitating and unleashing learning (Salzberger-Wittenberg et al., 1983; French 1997). This relationship between learner and the agent of learning is strongly influenced by the dynamics of transference and counter-transference, the complex and largely unconscious emotional forces which bind together student and teacher, practitioner and consultant, patient and analyst (Freud, 1940/1986). Transference is a process whereby feelings and images towards figures of authority or knowledge are repetitions of earlier experiences of relations with authority figures, notably parents. An important psychoanalytic insight derives from the work of Winnicott (1962, 1964, 1980), who argued that effective learning takes place within a ‘holding environment,’ an environment which allows enough space for experimentation and play, which is safe enough without being stifling or overbearing. The holding environment in organizations, including schools and universities, recreates the experience of the mother’s embrace, an embrace which allows the child to realize that he or she has an independent existence in the world without, however, exposing him or her directly to the threats engendered by this world. The management of anxiety then becomes seminal in all learning situations, since too much or too little anxiety inhibits learning. Too much anxiety and learning is paralyzed; too little anxiety and learning never appears on the agenda.