ABSTRACT

THINKING PROBLEMS The preceding notes conclude Freud’s (1911) speculative sketch on the pleasure principle and the reality principle; both propose the psyche’s radicalism. These remarks follow on the trail of his dream theory; they carry the force of the elemental wish and its “wild education” into the swirls of the mind and then outward into the world of others. Notice, however, in Freud’s aforementioned point five, that it may take a modern army of teachers to disillusion “the ancient pleasure principle.” Later in this chapter, we turn to the thickets of the teacher’s pleasure principle, her or his infantile roots of wild education. For now, we observe that Freud thought of the teacher’s responsibility as receiving wishes and interpreting them. Teachers cannot work from their automatic pilot; they have the added burden of overruling the dispensation of unconditional love. With rewards come punishments, and the greatest is disappointed love. However, students, after all, are no strangers to these events because rewards and punishments also occur in the mind.