Facing Aggression in the Pedagogical Relationship: Lessons from Fencing and Psychoanalysis‪.‬

When I was a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, I learned from my parents what was acceptable and unacceptable in our home. One message I received among many was clear: anger, yelling, fighting, and even disagreements were forbidden. Voices were never raised in anger under any circumstances in our home. A glance, a gesture, a symbol were all used to reinforce a strict policy of peace at any cost. Perhaps because my parents were radically committed to the peace movement, for a while members of the Communist Party, or perhaps because of overdetermined patterns of relating to one another, anger was simply not allowed. However, there was one place where the expression of aggression was allowed, where it was acceptable, and even applauded: athletics. I knew in sports I was free to be as openly aggressive as I wanted to be. And the sport I chose to pursue as a young man, the sport that allowed me to express my unacknowledged and unconscious aggression was fencing. I understand today that fencing, along with lengthy analysis and analytic training, eventually allowed me to face and "hold" those aggressive impulses, impulses directed both toward others and myself. More important I can now see how fencing and my psychoanalytic work provided insight into teaching, for teaching is, as I shall argue in this paper, a relationship shot through with aggression. Furthermore, I would suggest that in order for a teacher to be present to his or her students, in order for a teacher to be "wide-awake" or mindful of the students, that teacher must acknowledge, understand and be able to "hold" her or his own aggressive impulses as well as those of the students. It took me a long time to come to such an understanding. I certainly didn't have it when I began to study fencing.