Screening the Psycho-Dynamics of Learning to Teach: A Study of Depression in Teacher Education

Screening the Psycho-Dynamics of Learning to Teach is a psychoanalytic study about the status of depression in teacher education. How do films that depict depressed teachers and students offer educationalists a resource for working through depression in pedagogy? I suggest that the interminable process of learning to teach requires teachers to encounter loss, vulnerability, and sadness. Yet, the ubiquity of these emotional conditions means that depression, as a psychical defense against strong emotions, pervades the profession of teaching and prevents teachers and learners from thinking creatively. With the problem of the teachers depression in mind, I turn to three recent films about depressed educational subjects, Monsieur Lazhar (2011), Half Nelson (2006), and Mona Lisa Smile (2004) to examine both how popular representations of education depict depression in teaching and how these representations may be used as a resource for making significance of the extraordinary and mundane emotional conflicts of learning to teach. I frame my discussion of depression using the psychoanalytic theories of the dead mother (Green, 1980) and the dead teacher (Farley, 2014) in order to think about how new teachers (lost) desire affects teaching and learning relations. In each chapter, I analyze one film using one psychoanalytic concept that is relevant to pedagogy: transference in Half Nelson, identification in Mona Lisa Smile, and melancholia in Monsieur Lazhar. Alternatively, these chapters each analyze one depressed figure who haunts the scene of education: the teacher in Half Nelson who is in transference with a caring student repeats the unconscious fantasy of the emotionally dead mother; the new teacher in Mona Lisa Smile identifies with feminist historical fantasies in order to sustain her teaching desire for the depressed student(s); and, the depressed teacher in Monsieur Lazhar finds a surviving maternal teacher through whom he learns to symbolize and mourn his losses in teaching. The final chapter turns from visual analysis of the films to a discussion of the films as sites of viewer pedagogy. I suggest finally that viewer emotional responses to the films often repeat the psychodynamics of pedagogy represented on screen. Film pedagogy thus creates a space for viewers to remember, repeat, and work through the emotional conflicts of teaching and learning.