Heather Price

JUMPING ON SHADOWS: CATCHING THE

UNCONSCIOUS IN THE CLASSROOM

This article discusses case material from a psychoanalytically informed ethnographic

research project where the author had a dual role as a teaching practitioner and researcher
in an infant school. It suggests that practitioner researchers can deepen a concern with
reflexivity in the research process by transferring elements of the practice of the
psychoanalytic clinician — specifically, attention to ‘counter-transference’ — to their
research practice. The article reviews the concept of counter-transference. It suggests that
working out the difference between transference and counter-transference may be connected
unconsciously to working out the distinctions between ego and superego. The article then
goes on to provide an illustration of the way in which the author attempted to use her own
counter-transference to inform her research into young children’s learning, specifically in
relation to her experience of being a teacher. The discussion connects this to the teacher’s
transferential place as a parental and ‘superego’ figure for pupils. Observational extracts
are drawn from the case study of ‘Lutfa’, a Bengali girl placed at the lower end of the
ability group range. The article concludes by suggesting that attention to counter-
transference dynamics as a form of reflexivity can provide the practitioner-researcher with
valuable information about the research subjects and about dynamics in the setting,
particularly the participants’ relationships to ‘superego’ figures.

Keywords ethnographic; reflexivity; counter-transference; superego; young

child learners

The stone curlew

I am reading a book with six year old Benjamin.1 It is about camouflage in the animal
kingdom:

I point to a picture of a bird then read the text to Ben. ‘This bird is called a stone
curlew. It is well camouflaged, but you can still see its shadow. In daylight, solid
things always have shadows. This helps you to see where they are.’ I point out the
shadow of the bird and then point to the next picture where the bird has sat down
and its shadow is gone. I say that when it lies down, the shadow is gone. ‘Not
gone!’ says Ben rather triumphantly. I say, ‘Well, I can’t see it’. Ben says, as if
catching me out, ‘It’s underneath the bird’.
(Classroom observational record, Benjamin, mid-January)
Journal of Social Work Practice Vol. 20, No. 2, July 2006, pp. 145–161
ISSN 0265-0533 print/ISSN 1465-3885 online ß 2006 GAPS
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/02650530600776830
146 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

The image of the stone curlew provided me with a rich metaphor for
thinking methodologically and conceptually about several different facets of my two-
year ethnographic research project in an infant school. This explored the
emotional dynamics in play when young children are learning to read and write. It
considered how these shaped the children’s identities and achievements as literacy
learners.
In conducting fieldwork for the study, I took up a partially camouflaged position.
I aimed to blend into the social research field, spending a small part of my one day a
week in school on the sidelines, observing children and teachers, and the greater part
of it in role as a literacy support teacher, taking individuals, pairs and threesomes
across the ability range.2
Andrew Pollard (1996) is an educational ethnographer who has studied school
learning in the early years. He is convinced that more attention needs to be given to
the significance of relationships, as the place where young children ‘do’ their learning.
He chose a qualitative research methodology in order to achieve this, and noted at the
start of his research project:

My intuitive response, as a former primary school teacher through the 1970s

and as a parent of two young children, was that some very important points [in
contemporary educational policy] were being missed. In particular, I felt that
there was very little understanding of the personal and interpersonal nature of
the learning of young children or of the importance of the social contexts in
which learning takes place. Such issues have always been rather subtle,
ephemeral and hard to document but I believed that they were particularly
important.
(Pollard, 1996, p. xi)

Following Pollard, and guided by my own experience as a teacher, I also believed

that the relational and affective dimension to children’s learning at school — the
emotional context of it — was extremely important to their progress and to the
particularity of their identities as learners. Influenced by psychoanalysis (see
Salzberger-Wittenberg et al., 1983), I saw my research subjects as learners who
had invisible networks of unconscious affective relationships to their teachers,
peers and friends in the classroom, as well as to the objects in the room. I was
particularly interested to explore these unconscious relationships, as I felt they
would be a powerful contributory factor to the children’s expectations when
learning, and therefore to their relative success or failure at school. However, I
was also aware that accessing the unconscious dimension of experience and
warranting my interpretations of this, as a researcher, would not be easy. The
image of the camouflaged stone curlew, in defensive hiding, spoke to this. As an
image it underscored the complex relationship between the self-aware parts of
ourselves, the parts ‘in daylight’, and the unconscious parts that are hidden and
‘underneath’, but nevertheless function, as artists know that shadows do, to give
psychic definition to our sense of self and to our relationships to our objects,
fixing them in place.
 JUMPING ON SHADOWS 147

Transference and counter-transference

In order to think further about the nature of my own and my child subjects’
unconscious affective relationships in the classroom, I made use of the psychoanalytic
concepts of transference and counter-transference.
The psychoanalytic concept of ‘transference’, developed originally by Freud
(1905), provides insight into the inter-subjective and unconscious nature of our
emotional modes of relating. In labouring at his ‘self’ analysis in the early years of the
development of psychoanalysis, Freud experienced the phenomenon of transference
personally, and only then came to define it theoretically (Gay, 1988, pp. 96–100).
Through painful reflection upon his relationship to his (recently deceased) father, and
to his (same-aged) nephew and later close male friends, Freud saw that his
contemporary conscious relationships possessed an undertow. He argued that
conscious relationships carry the shadow of past patterns of relating, primarily to
parents and siblings. Freud called this the individual’s ‘family complex’ (Freud, 1922,
p. 280) and argued that it is inevitably evoked and re-worked in the present. As
‘transference’ is now very commonly referred to in clinical and psychodynamic
counselling literature, it can be easy to forget the significance of the fact that Freud
found its discovery painful. Our transferential feelings may be ones we would rather
not know about consciously.
In thinking about how the transference was experienced as a phenomenon
between patient and analyst, later analysts were to stress the active quality of what
Melanie Klein called ‘projective identification’ (Bion [1962] in Bott Spillius, 1988).
The term came to refer to the (arguable) phenomenon whereby one individual
‘projectively identifies’ another as, for example, hostile. This is because of his or
her own hostile feelings towards them. In other words, one attributes hostility,
and then experiences this coming from the other. The other may in fact then be
and feel hostile, and psychoanalysts theorise that this is so not simply because they
may have been treated in an overtly hostile manner, but because additionally they
are the recipients of a covert incitement to hostility. This incitement is the
outward sign of one’s original ‘splitting off’ and disavowing of hostility. It is
located with the other. The phenomenon of projective identification was to
become implicated in the understanding of the psychoanalytic concept of ‘counter-
transference’.
Freud first used the term ‘counter-transference’ in 1910. As a good clinician he
was concerned to take up an objective and informed vantage point on the highly
emotive material his sick patients brought for analysis. But he soon found that he
missed dimensions of the affective significance of such material as a result of his own
subjective feelings and assumptions in relation to it. As in the discovery of
transference, he had to admit to the difficulties his own unconscious affective states
were posing, and had to reflect upon them, before he came to the theory of counter-
transference (see the case study of ‘Dora’ and Freud’s discussion of his mistakes:
Freud, 1990 [1905], pp. 159–162). He trod, as it were, on his own shadow as he
attempted to move deeper into the world of his patients’ unconscious. Freud was at
pains to stress that ‘transference’ of past patterns of relating will manifest themselves
in relation to the person of the clinician. The patterns will be obscured for the
148 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

clinician if his or her own parallel transference experience of the patient ‘blocks the
light’, as it were.
Using the notion of projective identification, Paula Heimann (1950, 1956), a
contemporary of Melanie Klein, suggested that projective identification might involve
something more than simple evacuation. Patients might evoke experiences in the
analyst as a way of ‘projectively’ and unconsciously communicating something of their
own experience. Melanie Klein, however, continued to emphasise how the dimension
of counter-transference was likely to represent emotional and unconscious experience
that belonged ‘at first hand’ to the clinician. Her biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth,
notes,

In one supervision Sonny Davidson told her [Klein] that ‘I interpreted to the
patient that he put his confusion into me’. Mrs Klein replied, ‘No, dear, that’s
not it, you were confused’.
(Grosskurth, 1986, p. 449)

Therefore counter-transference may indicate something of the patient, and

something of the analyst. In the contemporary psychoanalytic literature, Klein’s
and Heimann’s understandings of what counter-transference might be are not
seen as mutually exclusive. The ‘confusion about confusion’ Sonny Davidson
suffered, concerning where the confusion ‘belonged’, then highlights a difficulty
about how one knows what the origins of different parts of an unconscious
experience are, given an inter-subjective or inter-psychic emotional and social
context. The example also draws attention to the sense of bewilderment and
painful uncertainty that can be experienced when one gives up one’s ordinary,
naı̈ve sense of conviction about who started what. There is self-doubt, as one
tries to work out at a more shadowy level where feelings have originated from,
and ‘who caused what’.
This epistemological conundrum, of apparently ‘hopeless’ subjectivity when
we relate to each other, mirrors the predicament of the psychoanalytic patient,
who can struggle to know, consciously or unconsciously, where self ends and
the other begins. This struggle can often be connected to an attempt to work
out, consciously or unconsciously, who to ‘blame’ or hold responsible for a state
of mind that appears to be ‘in the air’. Indeed, when ordinary interaction gets
heated, and people row, a sense of grievance or guilt often surfaces concerning
who will or will not admit to having started ‘it’ (the bad feeling). There is
often a desire both to gain a grip on the real parameters of the interaction, and
to end the uncertainty by passing judgement on self or other. The way that
notions of blame and responsibility often surface during struggles in relationships
suggests that the process of self–other disentangling might mirror, in
psychoanalytic terms, an inner struggle to know where ego ends and superego
begins. A psychoanalytic perspective would be curious about our tendency to
seek to apportion blame and allocate responsibility when in emotional dialogue,
and would be interested in the part played by the superegos of the participants,
because of the role of the superego in passing a moral judgement rather than a
reality judgement.
 JUMPING ON SHADOWS 149

The ‘shadow of the object’ and the superego

Following a line of thought about processes of separation, mourning and melancholia
Freud (1917 [1915]) developed the concept of the superego as the critical moral
agency of the mind. He saw it as the voice of the parents, who have been internalised
as a form of authority when the young child separates out from them in early
childhood (Freud, 1923). Freud thought the relationship to this inner authority
varied, and he had been struck with how disparaging and unrealistic a voice it supplied
in depression. He noticed how isolated and self-critical depressed patients could be, as
if they were struggling with a stuck inner experience of being left alone or abandoned
by some often-unspecified other whom they dared not blame. He spoke of the ‘…
shadow of the object [falling] upon the ego’ (Freud, 1917/1915, p. 258) in a way that
left the depressed person with a dominating superego that seemed to deplete their ego
of resources.
Freud thought therefore that the functions of critical appraisal, appreciation or
deprecation, and self-reflection, could be divided in very complex ways between the
ego and the internalised parent-figure, the superego. Following on from Freud,
Melanie Klein discussed how in very early childhood, a very harsh ‘parental imago’
exists, upon which the early superego is formed. This tangles up real qualities of the
parents with the aggression that the frustrated infant has projected onto them (Klein,
1935).
As Ronald Britton (2003) is at pains to emphasise though, Freud maintained
ultimately that judgement about self and other, observation of self and other and
critical reflection are functions of the ego, which is the part of our mind that we use
when learning from our experience. In psychoanalytic terms, it is the ego which is
credited with responsibility for our capacity to be accurate when we pursue our
‘researches’ in the world. Britton reminds us that in classical psychoanalysis, the ego is
the only rational part of the mind, primarily concerned with what’s really ‘out there’,
with the reality principle and with ‘truth function’ (Britton, 2003).
In recent contemporary Kleinian clinical writing, including Britton’s, there is a
concern with how to restore or return estranged functions of judgement, potency and
a sense of ‘possession’ of trustworthy self-knowledge to those (depressed, depleted)
patients whose ego is weakened by the corresponding strength of a ‘harsh’ superego.
Such patients may be at the beck and call of real or imaginary dominating others. The
ego functions that the clinician seeks to restore are very different from the
unconscious judgementalism, omnipotence and possessiveness that may be evident in
relation to self and others as a result of harsh superego functioning. Psychoanalytic
practice is concerned with restoring the distinction between ego and superego, and
with assisting the agentive dimension of the self so that the ego is more integrated, less
depleted, and more able to assert its own realistic judgement of experience.
Within the predominantly realist philosophical position assumed by many
contemporary mainstream psychoanalysts (see O’Shaughnessy, 1994), a position taken
up by some ‘subtle realist’ ethnographers as well (Hammersley, 1992), there is a
parallel concern to reassert the power of the analytically ‘researching’ ego, and the
possibility of epistemologically valid interpretation. Our interpretations are not purely
subjective or relative versions of events. We can make judgements of fact, which
150 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

should not be moral judgements, about the distinctions between and within self and
other, and about the states of mind of self and other. Of particular importance is
that we should do so having kept faithful records, whether clinical or ethnographic;
and where appropriate, we should ‘triangulate’ — check our interpretations with
colleagues and with the person with whom we are in dialogue. O’Shaughnessy notes
however, that as an interpreting psychoanalyst there is always anxiety inherent in
making a ‘truth claim’, in claiming to know, because it implies one may be right —
or wrong. In other words, there is a ‘fact of the matter’ and if one is right, some
objective status to the claim. She notes, ‘… all psychoanalytic schools make a claim
for truth — which is why, I think, our debates are so impassioned’
(O’Shaughnessy, 1994, p. 942).
In what follows, I discuss the concept of the superego in relation to my research
into teaching and learning in an infant school. I then consider my work with Lutfa, a
Bengali girl placed at the lower end of the ability group range. I attempt to show how
I reflected upon my own counter-transference when working with Lutfa and also
when observing her. Such reflection enabled me to understand aspects of Lutfa’s inner
relationship to a superego figure, a figure whom she could projectively experience
externally, in the presence of teachers. It also helped me to understand some of the
inner and outer relationships to a superego figure which teachers may also experience.
Understanding my own counter-transference was not an easy process and took time.
As O’Shaughnessy notes, there was also anxiety inherent in arriving at a sense of
relative certainty about what had taken place, emotionally, between Lutfa and myself,
and Lutfa and other teachers, and in committing myself to a particular interpretation
of unconscious events. As I was relatively new to ‘depth’ self-reflexivity in a research
setting, it was only after completing my work with Lutfa that I found I was able to
understand it at a deeper level and thus use it to make deeper sense of the power
dynamics in play in the teaching relationship.

The teacher as parent figure and transferential superego

In school, I was inevitably cast in the role of parental and ‘superego’ figure by pupils,
simply by virtue of being the teacher. As Shaw (1995) has pointed out, infant school
children often slip between ‘Mum’ and ‘Miss’. The teacher, in loco parentis, sits
structurally in the place of the superego, or ego-ideal, for the child subject or pupil. I
was interested in the children’s relationship to authority, and in what kind of
‘superego’ object teachers might be, for different pupils. Psychoanalytic writing draws
attention to the superego’s relationship to the ego as a potentially supportive guide or
an absolutist saboteur (for example, Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984; Britton, 2003). The
power of the school teacher’s authority may be particularly relevant in the infant
school, where one is working with relatively young, dependent and powerless pupils.
The ‘teacher-adults’ are very much ‘in the know’, as parents are; they often provide,
demand and create the first experiences of law, order and orderliness outside the
family. They hold authority as parents do because they can guide, train and instruct,
and facilitate learning; and because they are invested with so much more power and
knowledge than the child.
 JUMPING ON SHADOWS 151

In relation to individual pupils, it is easy for the teacher figure to become all-
powerful and to incite rebellion. It is also easy for the teacher to avoid being held to
account for their own part in this dynamic, their own projections into pupils, as
affected by the inevitable unconscious biases of their own inner relationships to
authority. Salzberger-Wittenberg discusses teaching relationships that evidence
evasion of authority and collusion with pupil delinquency, as well as those
characterised by authoritarianism (Salzberger-Wittenberg et al., 1983). Pollard (1996)
also emphasises the differential adult–child power relation:

In general, adults have the power to initiate, assert, maintain and change rules,
whilst children must comply, adapt, mediate or resist … [sensitivity to this] … is
important for only a child with an exceptionally confident learning stance is likely
to take any chances within a context in which risks and costs of failure are high.
(Pollard with Filer, 1996, p. 11)

It was my assumption that individual teachers and children respond differently, and
reach different kinds of consensus, in relation to this structural dynamic of the
teaching and learning task. Despite negotiation, the child has to manage a greater
degree of dependence and need; and the teacher has to handle a greater degree of
power.
In what follows, I therefore consider not just Lutfa’s transferences to me, and to
other teachers and children, but mine to her, and the possible transferences of other
members of staff, given that in the inter-subjective emotional field of the classroom,
both pupil and teacher can be projectively identified with the other.

Lutfa: a background summary3

I met Lutfa at the start of Year Two (the ‘top’ infant year). Lutfa was a summer-born
Bengali child who was therefore young for her year group. In addition, her spoken
English was poorer than that of her Bengali classmates, despite having joined the
school in nursery, and despite continuous EAL4 support. Lutfa had always had a place
in the group of lowest achievers, with only one or two other girls. She did not enter
the top year of the infant school with a particularly good reputation amongst staff,
being a noticeably fidgety child in a large group, who was often inattentive. She also
tended to cry quite easily in the classroom or playground, and possibly unusually for a
girl of her age, resorted quite quickly to physical aggression with peers. One child
told me, when I ‘chose’ Lutfa for work,5 ‘You shouldn’t take Lutfa. She’s a naughty
girl’.
Over the first half term of Year Two these problems of previous years lessened,
although Lutfa could be unexpectedly and unpredictably defiant towards her new class
teacher, often in front of the whole class group, in ways that involved silent refusal.
Her class work remained well below average. Year Two, like Year Six, was deemed a
‘hard working’ year in which a certain level of responsibility for their own learning
was now expected of the children. Overall, the school did very well academically,
despite having a much higher number than average of children on free school meals.
Important Standard Attainment Target tests (SATs tests) were taken after the Easter
152 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

holidays, and the staff naturally wanted their ‘underprivileged’ children to do as well
as possible and fulfil their potential. The test results would partly determine the
school’s ranking in local and national league tables. Thus, this last year of the infants
was important and it was partly in this light that Lutfa’s mother approached the
home–school liaison teacher to express an increased concern about her daughter’s
language development and reading and writing ability. She felt that although she
attempted to work hard with Lutfa at home, nothing was ‘going in’.
The EAL teacher had worked briefly with Lutfa before, and felt that she was a
slow developer, whose language development in Bengali also lagged behind that of her
peers. The teacher thought Lutfa was very young even for her age, and was
sympathetic to her problems. Perhaps, she thought, Lutfa was still struggling to find
her place in her family and in the classroom. Lutfa’s louder, more confident brothers
were also in the school, one two years above her, and the other in the year
immediately below.
In addition to weekly sessions with me, Lutfa began to have short individual
literacy sessions with this particular EAL teacher two or three times a week. Her one-
to-one teaching was clear and highly didactic, in contrast with my more child-led
approach. In these one-to-one settings, Lutfa quickly formed powerful attachments to
each of her ‘individual’ teachers, working very hard to meet our (different!)
expectations. This sustained effort carried through into the small group sessions with
her EAL teacher. Yet in the larger classroom group, Lutfa continued to appear
inattentive and rather oppositional. When her teachers communicated about her, we
could tend to stress different learning needs. I ventured the opinion that she needed
more space to play and assert herself. Her EAL teacher thought she needed clearly
targeted ‘input’, to help her grasp the literacy basics. Her class teacher thought she
needed to follow other children’s examples in settling down and concentrating
harder.
By the end of the spring term, Lutfa had received a lot of extra input. When
she came back from the holidays after Easter, she confounded the general
expectation that she would produce an ‘ungraded’ Standard Attainment Test
literacy paper, and achieved a low-to-average score. She confirmed her teachers’
sense that over the course of the spring term she had been making steady if slow
progress as a fledgling reader and writer. She had also become increasingly able to
learn her particular class teacher’s idiom, which was much to her advantage. She
was more able to find a way of relating to the teacher, on the teacher’s terms. Her
‘top infant’ class teacher that year encouraged independence of mind and active
engagement, as well as having a lively and astringent sense of humour. Lutfa’s
relationship with her continued to be tempestuous, and Lutfa still frequently found
herself reprimanded and singled out crossly, with exasperation, for being
inattentive. When this happened Lutfa could appear very hurt and angry, and I
found I felt very angry on her behalf. However, Lutfa could also feel rewarded by
the class teacher’s praise and recognition of her, when she demonstrated her own
independent thinking and effort.
The extracts below are ethnographic, process recorded notes of two of Lutfa’s
lessons with me, at either end of the summer term. In the first she has clearly begun
to ‘take off’ in her reading, and in the last session, at the end of the summer term, her
 JUMPING ON SHADOWS 153

anxiety about writing is still very much apparent. On analysis, the sessions provoke
thought about the particular unconscious ego–superego dynamics between Lutfa and
her teachers, and inside Lutfa.

Lutfa: ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ processes of learning

First lesson after Easter

Lutfa rifles through the readers on the table, saying, ‘Oh! I know all these books!
Easy!’ ‘Are they easy for you?’ I ask. ‘I can read all of them! So, so easy!’ She
fiddles curiously with the tape recorder on the table. I realise that she is much
taller, slimmer, with longer hair, than back in the autumn. She reaches quickly
for The Very Hungry Giant and reads the first two pages reasonably steadily,
struggling only with saying and remembering the words ‘bommy knocker’ (the
giant’s weapon). She flicks ahead and says, ‘I know what happens! I know! He …
he … gets this and he hits it and it’s not honey and they all come out and bite
him!’ I see that the giant hits a hive, and say, ‘They sting him …’. ‘Uhhh?’ Lutfa
says. ‘The bees … the bees sting him.’ ‘UhhhH?’ she says, louder, laughing,
emphasising that she doesn’t know what I am talking about. I mime stinging by
landing on her arm and she looks uncertainly at me. She carries on reading
without comment.
[Several readers later] I say, ‘OK, maybe now we could tell our own story
onto the tape …’. She interrupts me and says, ‘No! Now we’ve got to do our
spellings! I’m going to give you …! Where’s the rubber? Your turn first …’. She
tells me not to look, asks me if I want ‘easy or hard’ (I say ‘easy’) and covers two
words with the rubber. I guess them after thought. She nods, pleased, then pulls
the rubber away triumphantly. Then I ask her and she requests words that are,
‘Easy, easy! Very very easy!’ We play a few rounds and she guesses hers easily.
Once, in testing me, she wants to cover up a long word, and tries using a pencil,
then chunks of a sentence, using her fingers as the teacher does in class. When
this reveals bits of the sentence to me, she reverts to the rubber and single words.
At one point she says, ‘Stop looking! You’re looking and cheating!’ I say, ‘I’m
not!’ but then I start peeping and looking away quickly as she looks round to
catch me. She accuses me of cheating and I deny it, straight-faced, and as I carry
on she bursts into peals of laughter. This is infectious and she makes me laugh
too. We play several rounds like this, dissolving into giggles. Then I feel we are
carrying on the laughter a bit and I quieten and suggest we have a go at telling a
story.
Lutfa looks reluctant and I suggest we take it in turns. I ask Lutfa who could
be in the story and she says, ‘A girl and a boy’. I turn on the tape and say, ‘Once
upon a time there was a girl and a boy’. I press pause and gesture for her to ‘go’.
She presses pause and says, ‘One day the girl was in her house and she played …
Barbies’. I say, ‘She put the wedding dress on the Barbie’. Lutfa says, ‘Then a boy
came to her house. Can I play? Yes you can’. I carry on, ‘He didn’t want to play
Barbies, he wanted to play with the racing cars’. ‘Yes, I will play with the racing
154 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

cars.’ ‘So he played with the yellow one and she played with the green one.’
‘Then he went back to his own house.’ ‘Then she had her dinner.’ ‘Then it was
bath time.’ ‘Then she went to bed.’

Discussion
For much of this session at the start of the summer term, Lutfa leads and I follow. She
finds she can secure a position of greater control and mastery — over the object of
her learning, and over me. Lutfa handles The Very Hungry Giant with ease and can
reflect upon what happens in the story. When she picks up the fact that I am
correcting her English, she finds this disconcerting and threatening of her control of
the situation. She goes quickly back to the situation she is in control of — reading.
Here, after much hard work all year, she is finally more frequently at ease with books
as satisfying learning objects, and reading gratifies her without disproportionate effort.
She is able to spontaneously voice her simultaneous engagement with what is ‘behind’
the words she reads aloud. She can do two things at once, and there is an inner mental
space in which to ‘turn the reading object’ about and comment on it. The ‘flat’ quality
that exists in children’s reading, when their attention is exclusively on decoding,
begins to go.
I then suggest story-telling onto tape, something I have attempted to initiate a
couple of times before, to begin the process of ‘telling’ and recalling a story, for
subsequent writing. Lutfa wants to return to safer territory which she has command
of, and takes the initiative in introducing the ‘spelling’ game. Lutfa’s sense of potency
with words, and her greater control over the text, as well as greater flexibility with it,
is transferred into her relationship to the word guessing game and to me. She does not
just copy but can invent variations on the ‘theme’ she has seen the teachers use. She
can also identify enough with the ‘real’ me to put herself in my shoes, guess
realistically about what I will find stretching and put me to the test. She takes the role
of the teacher as she has done periodically and tentatively in the past, but here she
ensures I am to be pushed to guess long words and whole chunks of sentences. I am to
do it all by myself, without any help by cheating or looking. It is interesting that this
lesson occurred during a period of intense SATs practice in class. At this point in the
year, I think Lutfa had an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what
‘being behind’ was. The SATs period seriously tested her new-found self-esteem,
but it held.
However, Lutfa complies when I direct us back to storytelling. ‘Girl and boy’
have been the backbone of some simple stories she has told. She sticks to her
trusted format but there is some life and verisimilitude to the story. However, her
control over the story gradually ebbs. She doesn’t use or incorporate my ‘wedding
dress’ contribution but brings a boy playmate to her house and allows him in.
When I break the ‘Barbie’ game more decisively, she once again complies and it is
the little girl who ‘fits in’ with the stronger boy characters (echoing not just the
dynamics between us, but perhaps those at home). At the end we resort to a
familiar, ‘younger’ routine, rather than Lutfa fighting me for control of the story,
and retaining initiative.
 JUMPING ON SHADOWS 155

Counter-transference — the teacher as superego figure

In this lesson I felt as if there was some real playing taking place between Lutfa and I.
We took each other by surprise. In role as teacher, Lutfa risks ‘telling me off’, and I
find myself spontaneously becoming the child who is looking for the easy way out.
Young children love to replay the teacher–pupil role, to gain mastery; and make sense
of their own position as learners. In this lesson, I seem to understand first hand the
impulse to cheat and be naughty. This is reassuring and cathartic for Lutfa. That Lutfa
could express this in a lively way made me feel very relieved on her behalf and also
energised by her. In this particular session, then, it seemed as if in the transference
Lutfa identified with a good but exacting ‘inner’ parent–teacher object (an ‘ego-
ideal’) who would ‘push’ me hard. This reflected her own experience at the hands of
her teachers. She also used me, and identified me as herself, the child learner. I found
myself having ‘child-like’ impulses. My counter-transferential experience during the
guessing game was of suddenly wondering whether I would be able to remember the
large chunks of sentences Lutfa was covering up. Lutfa tellingly positions me as
rebellious (the place her child-self has often occupied), attributing cheating to me (as
it happens, wrongly). Here, she represents the harsh superego, relentlessly wanting
the child to stay up to scratch and stay in line, and looking for an excuse to punish.
But she has the vantage point on her own child-like feelings and impulses that she did
not have at the start of the year. That these feelings are emotionally in play between
us is suggested by the way her accusations ‘give me ideas’. My playful subversion of
her superego’s demands shows the child tricking the teacher. She ‘switches’ positions
to look at things from this other point of view and her laughter is close to appreciative
applause. She wants the scenario of me being ‘naughty’ to be repeated over and over.
There is distance, and much more freedom of movement, between the identificatory
positions available; and more positions can be put in play by both of us, and reflected
upon. Nevertheless, one can see how defensive positions may emerge in a less relaxed
setting. These might be the rebellious, cheating position; or the compliant one of
intense effort to ‘guess’ at very hard, obdurate material; or the position of just
reproducing earlier, ‘babyish’ material. These might be responses resorted to in the
face of an experience of a relentless teacher–superego figure, whose demands the ego
cannot keep pace with.
Towards the end of the session, though, her control is lost. ‘Telling a story’ is not
yet a learning task Lutfa can use from a position of assurance. She reverts to the safe
solution of complying with her superego figure, fitting into it, and into my story,
deferring to ‘my’ wants and laying aside her own, in order to remain on good terms,
in the face of my rather exacting demands.

Lutfa: getting it right and doing it wrong

Last lesson of the term

Over the last summer half term, Lutfa and I attempt writing as well as reading and
storytelling. Lutfa has made a couple of books with her own writing in them, one
copied from my scribed text and one written herself. Correct spelling, word spacing
156 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

and keeping mental hold of a sentence’s sequence is still difficult for her to do
independently, and she becomes frustrated when her writing does not make sense. In
the session below I try an exercise in joint writing as a way of providing her with a
scaffold. It is only partially successful.

We have been making up stories about the creatures on the alphabet chart and I
say, ‘We finished the other book about the fishes, didn’t we?’ She nods, adding, ‘I
finished it. It’s in my house. I finished it in my home’. ‘What was the fish called
again, Lallie?’ ‘LOLI!’ says Lutfa correctively, laughing at me. I suggest we both
have a go at doing the writing today, and ask her what she would like to tell the
next story about. She says, without hesitation, ‘The rabbit’. I say, ‘Oh, OK, you
start …’. She says, ‘The rabbit went to the park’. She hesitates then says, ‘How
d’you say, ‘‘one day …’’?’ I look thoughtful a moment and she adds, ‘I know!’
and writes it, looking at me for confirmation. I write, ‘One day …’ carefully. She
repeats, ‘The rabbit went to the park!’ cheerfully. I start writing and add, ‘rabbit,
we can look on the chart if we don’t know …’. She writes, ‘ribbit’, checks my
writing and says, worriedly, ‘Oh no! Done it wrong!’ I direct her to the chart and
she says anxiously, ‘Where? Where’s the rabbit?’ I don’t reply and she finds it,
‘Yea, there it is!’ She rubs out the ‘i’ carefully and writes ‘a’, looks at the rubber
smudge and says, ‘Oh no!’ under her breath.
I think and say, ‘She saw her friend Femi …’. We write this steadily each and
she spells ‘friend’ correctly and I praise her. She is pleased. ‘What next …?’ I ask.
She says, ‘Then she played with her friend’. She writes confidently. After this I
think for a moment and say, ‘Hmm. I wonder what they played’. She says, ‘They
could play on the swing!’ I say, ‘Yea …’. ‘Or the slide!’ she adds. ‘Yea …’ I say,
and say for writing, ‘They played on the swings’. We write this and I look at her
interrogatively and she says, ‘Then they played with slide!’ I say, ‘In English, you
say, ‘‘played on the slide …’’’. She writes, ‘Then they playde with sl …’ and
asks, ‘How do you spell slide?’ She looks over at my writing and sees that I’ve
written, ‘On the slide’ and says, ‘Oh no!’ I add consolingly, ‘It doesn’t matter
…’. She rubs out conscientiously, and then adds, ‘Oh no! It’s got all black bits!’ I
say, ‘Don’t worry — so’s mine!’ I gesture to where I’ve got smudges from
rubbing out earlier.
I um and ah about what to say next and then say, ‘I know … Femi saw a
swan!’ She grins at me and I say, ‘You know what swans are?’ She nods and I am
unsure whether she does or not. I say, ‘You know? Big white birds, and they’ve
got long necks, and orange beaks’. ‘I know’, she adds, more confidently, ‘Ducks
…’ I say, ‘Like ducks, but bigger …’. She says, ‘Duck … lings …’. I say,
‘Ducklings are smaller, those are baby ducks, swans are big and white …’. ‘I
know’, she says impatiently. I repeat, ‘Femi saw a swan’. I write and then see she
has begun to write, ‘Femi a swa …’. She stops herself, confused, saying, ‘How do
you spell ‘‘saw’’?’ I say, ‘You know’, and she writes it OK. I ask what to say next
and Lutfa says, ‘Femi chased the duck!’ She grins and I say, ‘Oh yes, Femi is a
rabbit, isn’t she!?’ We struggle over spelling ‘chased’ and ‘duck’ and get there
eventually, and I then say, ‘She was happy’. Lutfa writes confidently initially then
realises that her ‘pp’s are in fact ‘99’s. ‘Oh!’ she says, very cross with herself,
 JUMPING ON SHADOWS 157

‘It’s all smudgy!’ I have a sense she is about to give up or tell me its rubbish and I
reach over and say conspiratorially, ‘Look — just change them over … quick, over
the top … it won’t show …’. She alters it and I ask her what she could say next. She
says, ‘I know! Then they went to home!’ We write this. I then write, ‘The end’ with
a flourish and she writes it too, and carries on, with ‘… of the story it is goot story I
like the story. by Lutfa Begum’. Initiated by me, we swap writing.

Discussion
In this last session with Lutfa she reassures me that she finished her book on Loli the
fish and that it has gone home. The year is ending and at an unconscious level, I think
we both have in mind what each will take away from the other. We begin a new story
and initially she is confident, volunteering the topic and first sentence and changing
the first words by supplying a correct ‘beginning’. However, there is a suggestion she
feels on trial with her writing and is monitoring herself quite strictly. I deliberately
write slowly and laboriously (rather as I ‘spelled’ when we were playing our turn-
taking spelling games) in order to minimise unfavourable comparison but inevitably
my ‘teacher’s’ standards will prevail. My comments about ‘rabbit’ are designed to
assist with a spelling problem but the comparison with my correctly spelt word makes
her worry about her inadequacies. However, her anxiety is not so high that she gets in
a muddle or gives up — she finds her place and spells the next genuinely difficult
word correctly. She has chosen a familiar repetitive story well within her competence
to remember and write in English. She is really keen to succeed and do the writing
well. There might even have been an element of ‘playing’ with worry in a context
where she is not going to incur that much displeasure. In identification with the
teacher, girl groups in the classroom could often ‘fuss’ together about errors of
neatness in their work, smudges and so on.
We continue and she ‘keeps up’ with me, which gives her pleasure, although
integrating her part of the story with mine is done rather precariously. She does not
think to take charge, and I do not think to put her in charge — she is happy with us
‘shadowing’ each other although writing carefully like this and remembering what to
put is taking all her concentration. When I correct her English (‘played with slide’)
this seems too much to take in. When she sees that I have written something different
the mistake is again brought home to her and she is more upset.
In the exchange about swans and ducks it becomes inescapably noticeable that we
are talking about different things, and the joint effort breaks down. This conversation
recapitulated much earlier sessions when we were sharing books and I was unsure
what her comments meant. I would feel that I did not want to interrogate her, but fell
either into doing this or into ‘mending’ her conversation. Here, I wonder if Lutfa
cannot quite express what she wants to say, which may be something like ‘Swans are
big ducks’, or ‘Swans are like ducks’, or simply an association, perhaps even to The
Ugly Duckling. She does not want to be found in the wrong, or to be found to be
ignorant, but she is struggling to keep hold of the English sense and this persists in the
muddle between ‘saw’ and ‘swan’.
When Lutfa’s ‘p’s become ‘9’s there is simply too much error and confusion to
tolerate and I try to get rid of the sense of shame or disappointment for her by
158 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

becoming a classmate telling her how to ‘cheat’. It is her ‘go’ to ‘tell’ next and,
relieved, she sends Femi and her friend home. At the end of the lesson when the
‘work’ has been done, she suddenly writes freely, with no worries about the mis-spelt
‘goot’.

Counter-transference — the teacher as superego figure

In this last session, Lutfa is working hard and finding the process of learning pretty
effortful. Her storytelling space is quite constricted — by her lack of English and by
the need to recall and to find and write only what is correct. There is a recapitulation
of an inner process here — the process she went through in the early stages of
learning to read. Her concerns with careful accuracy and neatness unconsciously
express the way she effortfully desires to master and pin down this elusive but
controlling object, which then simultaneously pins her down. When the story’s thread
threatens to slip from her grasp, and lose clarity, she is quite ready to blame herself,
in parts, in a jokey way; but at other points, more anxiously.
I felt that Lutfa was struggling to hold onto her place inside a story and object
which was not quite hers, but perhaps more the ‘big girl’s’ story, my story, the
‘grown up’ story I want her to produce and that she very much wants to produce. The
rubber threatens to spoil her work and I think there is a moment when a tantrum,
refusal or rebellion threatens against a too-harsh, or controlling, superego.
This lesson was an example of several lessons with Lutfa where I found myself
wondering, on re-reading my record, why I kept somehow ‘getting in Lutfa’s light’,
perhaps because I both join in with being the pupil with her, and yet also take the
position of teacher. In the example above, I neither quite let her get on with her own
story, nor require her to follow one of the teacher’s devising. I am both a ‘parent–
teacher’ figure and a ‘quasi-sibling’ figure, in that I demand the work but also
encourage a bit of harmless ‘cheating’ behind the teacher–superego’s back. On re-
reading this record I wondered why I had set up a writing frame where Lutfa has to
compare herself with me, as if I were a more able pupil sitting next to her in class.
This did replicate a classroom situation in which the writing of the person sitting next
to her was usually more accurate than her own. In my counter-transference, I felt
guilty at having done this, and came to think the exercise was a mistake. I realised on
re-reading that I felt I had been too bossy towards Lutfa, as well as somehow
wanting to join in with playing at being a pupil. What, for goodness’ sake, was I
doing? But was I being a bit over-harsh about it all as well? After all, Lutfa seemed
basically to have grown in confidence over Year Two and got something, separately
and together, from each of the three members of staff involved with her, including
myself.
I realised that for some reason, more than other pupils I worked with, Lutfa
evoked the child pupil in myself. She stirred up both the part of myself in school that
felt it had to live up to an image of a rather idealised, very diligent, compliant and so
successful pupil; and the part of myself that wanted to play or mess up and confound
the teacher and her over-strict demands. These were parts of myself to do with my
own history, triggering my protectiveness towards Lutfa and also my demands of her.
But also, Lutfa herself evoked that in me; she brought into the classroom, through
 JUMPING ON SHADOWS 159

projective identification, a rather active, controlling, exhortatory response in her

parental object, and I think this was a projection of the figure she had inside her.

Conclusion
In this article, I have drawn on case material from a psychoanalytically informed
ethnographic research project in order to show how attention to transference and
counter-transference dynamics in the research setting can deepen a concern with
reflexivity in the research process. In discussing the concepts of transference and
counter-transference, I drew attention to the way in which the effort to disentangle
each from the other can be coloured by unconscious dynamics involving the
relationship between ego and superego. Making sense of the different unconscious
affective dynamics in the research setting, through reflecting upon one’s own counter-
transference, also involves making sense of the place of reality-based judgements and
moral judgements, and it is not easy to do this, or to warrant one’s interpretations.
However, this work can provide the qualitative researcher with a valuable source of
information about the nature of the research subjects’ inner worlds, and about the
nature of affective dynamics in the research setting.
Elements of the case study of Lutfa were presented. The article considered the
teacher’s transferential place as a parental and ‘superego’ figure for pupils, and looked
specifically at how Lutfa might have experienced her teachers. It can be seen from the
summary of Lutfa in Year Two that Lutfa prompted different attitudes and ways of
working in her three teachers, so that it was almost (but in practice, not quite) as if
she were being three different pupils in the three different settings.
Critical consideration of my own counter-transference in relation to Lutfa proved
hard work, as it was easy to take the credit for being ‘Miss Nice’ in Lutfa’s eyes, as
potentially the most easy-going of her teachers (and as a visiting volunteer researcher,
the one least accountable in the setting). But reflection on the counter-transference
provided insight into the potentially inter-subjective, more fluid nature of the
emotional dynamics between teachers and pupils, as they were played out between
Lutfa and myself.
Lutfa was the kind of pupil who could generate some tension in staff. Whilst from
a distance one could reflect that she had particular learning needs, which were actually
being addressed, the cause of them was somewhat invisible to her environment. She
was an EAL learner who had not responded ordinarily to the extra input that worked
for others in her position. She was also a child who was not noticeably and
dramatically failing. She simply presented as inattentive, slow and immature. The
emerging pedagogical culture that stressed hard work and achievement, noticeably
different from a previous era of ‘child-centredness’, was potentially intolerant
towards a (girl) child learner deemed ‘immature’ in this way, whereas other ‘ways of
seeing’ might have described Lutfa as not developmentally ready for the pace of her
particular classroom. It is hard not to see an institutional and policy-generated harsh
superego at work in this educational climate. Those who do not perform adequately
(at their SATs, in the league tables, and in OFSTED inspections) are the recipients
of harsh judgementalism as having ‘failed’. This takes the place of a more reality- or
160 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

ego-based assessment as to the actual causes of their failings, rooted in careful and
sympathetic diagnosis of the problem.

Notes
1 All identifying details in the case material have been altered and aspects have been
fictionalised to preserve confidentiality and anonymity in accordance with the terms
under which permission was given to conduct and publish the research.
2 I am a qualified DfES primary school teacher and was a Special Educational Needs
Co-Ordinator. I was in school as a doctoral research student, and I observed once a
week in two top infant classrooms, spending a year in each. I watched registration
and the National Literacy Hour (NLH). I then participated more fully in that I
taught in the remaining three sessions of the day, withdrawing children of varying
abilities to another room for literacy sessions (a common practice in the school).
3 This section, and the section below it, reviews material also discussed in Price
(2005).
4 English as an Additional Language.
5 In fact the class teacher suggested I work with Lutfa.

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Pollard, A. & with Filer, A. (1996) The Social World of Children’s Learning, Cassell, London.
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Heather Price is a Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies in the School of Social

Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London, and Deputy
Course Tutor of the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies at the Tavistock Clinic. Heather has
published on the emotional labour of teaching practitioners, on young children’s
emotional experiences of learning, and on researching and teaching from a psycho-
analytic perspective. Address: School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies,
University of East London, 4–6 University Way, London E16 2RD, UK. [email: h.s.price@
uel.ac.uk]