ABSTRACT
Students may feel that they need higher educational institutions (HEIs) in order to obtain an education, giving them greater opportunity for employment and careers. HEIs need students in order to continue to exist. K. Maclear takes the concept of uncertainty within education in a different direction as she offers an argument about the necessity of ‘empty-handed’ pedagogy. Melanie Klein developed the concept that the infant, unable to tolerate ambivalent or conflicting feelings, ‘splits’ their mother into two parts; the ‘good breast’ and the ‘bad breast’. Wilfred R. Bion furthered Klein’s theories by applying them to group settings, stating that ‘all the members of the group create and re-enact in an unconscious fashion the primal connection to the mother’s body’. A metaphor for the paranoid-schizoid position might be the image of the fairy-godmother and wicked step-mother in the Cinderella tale. John Steiner maintains that the paranoid-schizoid position is typified by concrete thinking, as the ability to imagine and symbolise is restricted.
