Introduction – why this focus

Schools, and more specifically teachers, have bravely tried to cope with children in trouble, and on many occasions they have been quite successful.¹ However, they have long urged that additional support be given to them, for they are aware that pedagogical knowledge has only a limited range of effectiveness in dealing with some of the problems in the classroom. As one teacher said: I'm deeply concerned about him because there's something that I can't identify – a sort of anguish. And I don't know if I'm incapable or if there are other things taking place which make me unable to sort it out. I mean, no-one would be able to sort it out.

Obviously, measures that boost teaching and evaluation methodology, that encourage staff members to research and learn continuously, that make school a more appealing institution for students by teaching relevant content, that make school a more effective participant in the community, should be adopted by any education policy. But the spectrum of need tends to expand, and more severe problems occur, when the damage brought about by social exclusion is deeper and more permanent. Unfortunately, the social drive of orienting most human activity towards success has reinforced disintegrative processes, with a profound impact on people's lives. According to Rustin (2001, p 205): The greater the pressure on the system and on individuals to produce success and avoid failure, in these relative terms, the more severe and destructive the emotional projections of worthlessness to the unsuccessful will be... the disvaluation and humiliation entailed by failure become so disabling...

Social exclusion will be understood here, therefore, as a disintegrative process that deprives the person of a sense of acceptance and value. When a certain degree of such disintegration has been reached, the damage is too extensive to be reversed merely by general measures aimed at the bulk of the people (Archangelo, 2003). When disintegration is part of the self, its treatment demands close attention. As Wilson (2001) says: I may get justice from people who view me with indifference or even with contempt. Justice and equality alone will give me only a minimal sense of being valued...The idea of being made to feel valued by "society", in this light, will now appear as largely vacuous: "society" is too anonymous and too generalized to do the job. That has quite severe practical consequences...
(p 19)

The effects of social exclusion can be well illustrated by the Brazilian Compulsory Education drop-out rate. Although it has decreased in recent years, it has remained stable at about 4–5%, despite some national and local attempts to prevent children from dropping out. Besides this, schools have a number of children who are not learning satisfactorily, though they remain in class. Obviously, this problem lends itself to different approaches (sociological, political, pedagogical and psychological, among others), and is manifest at different levels (societal, familial, institutional, individual). The damage caused by social exclusion, the difficulties that schools have struggled with in order to adapt to a changing society, the increasingly discussed unsatisfactory quality of teacher training, as well as learning and behavioural problems in the classroom might be studied from each of these perspectives. What I present here is one additional approach to school problems: a psychoanalytic approach. I focus mainly on the children, but also on teachers, in an attempt both to unveil the dynamic that prevents some of the students from engaging actively in the learning process and to discuss whether educational intervention may usefully be based on psychoanalytic concepts.

Avoiding misunderstanding – what school is for

The first question that arises is: What is the educational task and what is an anti-task? (Menzies-Lyth, 1988). This is not a new concern. Balint (1938), summarizing the Second Four-Countries Conference, held in 1937, quotes Anna Freud, Steff Bornstein, Dorothy Burlingham and Alice Balint, all of whom were preoccupied with the risks of an analytic pedagogy. In Anna Freud's words, This piecemeal emergence of analytic pedagogy is responsible for many contradictions and misconceptions. (cited in Balint, 1938, p 170)

Burlingham drew attention to the ...danger of over-emphasizing and over-valuing a particular analytic principle and neglecting the others, [and to the need for] the analytic educationist [...] not [to] overstep his legitimate sphere of activity. (cited in Balint, 1938, p 170)

Despite this risk, there is no doubt that psychoanalysis has something to contribute to education and that this contribution is worthy of attention. Balint, quoting Alice Balint, argues: The two main foundations of any system of education are: (1) the natural, instinctual interrelation of mother and child; (2) the social (economic) necessity. The first is constant, the second extremely variable. (cited in Balint, 1938, p 170)

Rustin (2001) has approached the educational field through Bion's model for the development of thought, and has argued that Crucial in this theoretical model is that the earliest "objects" of thought are charged with feelings. The mental processing of emotion is the earliest cognitive task in this model. (p 209)
...there are dimensions of feeling and relationship in all learning processes, and their common denial or misrecognition constitutes a serious educational and social problem. (p 211)

These statements teach us that one has to be careful not to over-step one's sphere of competence when attempting to bring psychoanalysis into the educational field, but this does not mean that we should not make the effort.

The responsibility of the school is, essentially, (1) to develop maturation, autonomy and preparedness for life in society; (2) to develop skills that enable and encourage both continuing learning and effective community participation; and (3) to introduce new generations to the values and knowledge that were produced by other generations and are still valued by the society and considered to be useful, helpful and relevant to it. As Menzies-Lyth (1988) argues, these are very vague tasks (as any "humane" institution's tasks are), which can easily be converted into anti-tasks. According to her, every person gives these statements a different meaning, which, to complicate things even more, is difficult to express verbally.

Going further, it can be said that even if one takes into consideration the most inspirational approach to education, one would find a subtly violent process taking place. That is to say, by nature, education is about the shattering confrontation between who we are and who we are supposed to become. It is also about promoting changes that replace the cognitive, attitudinal and procedural states with which the individual is familiar and comfortable, with other states. This requires the mind to be able to bear the tension caused by ruptures and reorganization. This sense of disintegration is not only felt by a psychotic mind, as was thought in the early development of psychoanalysis, but is also present in current life when mental changes are required. According to Hinshelwood (1997), it was Bion [who] elevated the experience of catastrophe to the most normal of all experiences. Every change requires the dissolution of the mind and a reformation into a new structure of thoughts and feelings. And thus a catastrophe must occur before a new idea is digested. (p 308)

In other words, there is an implicit dilemma at the core of the educational process that is addressed to everyone. This is similar to what Balint (1942) describes as the dilemma in psychoanalysis concerning ego weakness. One is supposed to be in analysis in order to overcome an ego weakness. On the other hand, being able to benefit from the interpretation requires a certain strength of the ego. Although this dilemma goes unnoticed in ordinary cases, for the children studied here it is a serious problem. The point is that education is aimed at changing a person to make him more capable of connecting with people and with life in society, but this presumes the ability, to some extent, to relate to people – to initiate and maintain contact with them – so that he/she can bear the strain of these intellectual, emotional and social changes and experience the joy of developing and using some new accomplishments. Inadequate first relationships add a considerable burden to the learning process. In extreme cases, what these relationships have created is so fearful that they prevent the person from becoming involved in quite normal tasks, which are supposed to be part of the learning process, such as holding a conversation.

According to the object relations model, the first relationships should allow the infant to have his anxieties processed by the adult and converted into a more tolerable and organized experience (Klein, Bion, Bick). But things can go wrong. When the adult cannot contain the infant's anxieties, the infant does not reintroject a fear made tolerable, but what Bion (1994) calls a "nameless dread". This tends to prevent relationships from being felt as reassuring. Instead, they will be seen as threatening. Education would mean, within this context, an exclusively intrusive process. Being committed to the learning process would expose the child's vulnerability to the nameless dread against which he is not properly and positively protected. The idea I want to explore is that these children are unprotected to the point of being at risk of "going into pieces" when experiencing what should be an integrative step (the educational process). Following this argument, my hypothesis is that what teachers may do, without over-stepping their sphere of competence, is to develop the ability to be with the children and to be, in so far as this is possible, less intrusive and as integrative as is feasible.

However, as mentioned above, not even this simple approach is without hazard. One of the risks is that real educational difficulties (and the difficulties of any sort that the staff encounter in pursuing educational progress, especially when there are "problem" students) may lead to an implicit redefinition of the educational task, converting it, for instance, into an anti-task related to therapy. The task may be implicitly redefined by reorienting the work to provide for dependency needs that may be anti-maturational. The educational task cannot be effectively accomplished merely by bringing the attitudes and behaviour of the professional therapist to bear. On the other hand, the needs are there and the institution must relate to them somehow. In other words, the task is close to an anti-task phenomenon. In some cases, providing for dependency needs becomes an institutional defence mechanism against the institution's relative failure to achieve the educational task. However, in other cases, the educational task cannot be achieved if the dependency needs are not understood and addressed.

The distinction that one needs to make may be illustrated by the following two questions: First, "What are the students' difficulties in learning which can be linked with the school's failure to carry out the primary tasks of education effectively?"; and second, "What are those difficulties which may be seen as an effect of the students" state of mind and which should be addressed by the school? Obviously, an educational institution must strive in the first instance to develop an effective pedagogy for the bulk of its students; however, there will always be a certain number of pupils for whom there is "something that goes beyond", as mentioned by a teacher, which prevents them from learning effectively. The school must develop an understanding of these cases and devise an approach that can reach these children so as to enable them to learn in the classroom environment. This work is intended to examine this second situation.

The research process

The children I studied are from a school that took part in a research project; the school is located in a socially excluded area of a medium-sized Brazilian city. As the research was aimed at children who are likely to drop out of school (and it is well known that children who are considered by teachers to be unsuccessful are more prone to fail), the teachers and head teachers were asked to designate the participants. They chose three boys. During the course of the research, another boy caught the research assistant's attention, as he attended the third year in Compulsory Education and did not write or read anything, but only copied everything from the blackboard. He was also included in the study. The children were aged between 8 and 9; all had difficulties with basic literacy and with social interactions.

All the children were observed at school once a week on average, for 4 months. The research was carried out by the author, an academic in the field of Educational Psychology. The children met with the researchers once a week, a time during which they could play, read, draw, or just talk. Given the focus of this paper, only two of the children, who will be called Lucas and Luis, will be quoted. The teachers were interviewed and so were the children's mothers.

The idea of second skin formation and its implications for the understanding of the children, their needs and difficulties at school

According to Bick (1968), the skin is the first experience of a boundary for the infant, that is, something that is able to bind his parts together. Contrary to Klein's (1957) idea of the existence of the ego at birth, which would allow the infant to distinguish between himself and the object and to oscillate between states of integration and disintegration, Bick's claim (1968) is that "being in pieces" is at first a sense of unintegration, rather than disintegration, and is the first stage for all infants, as there is as yet no prior ego. As Spillius (1988) says, fundamental to Bick's work is the "notion of a dreaded state of catastrophe as a basic and continuous aspect of human experience ..." (p 158).

For Bick, only when the boundary is achieved can the early ego develop its capacity to introject. In Bick's words: This internal function of containing the parts of the self is dependent initially on the introjection of an external object experienced as capable of fulfilling this function ... Until the containing functions have been introjected, the concept of space within the self cannot arise. Introjection, i.e., construction of an object in an internal space, is therefore impaired... . Disturbance in the primal skin function can lead to a development of a "second skin" formation through which dependence on the object is replaced by a pseudo-independence, by the inappropriate use of certain mental functions. (1968, p 56)

Hence, the first object relation is a passive experience and is the one that will bring the sense of integration from outside. Although the infant is incapable of striving for this experience, he will benefit from it, as it is a means for him to develop his ego (Briggs, 2002).

Hinshelwood (1997) points out that Bick's notion of the skin as the organ of containment has been criticized by psycho-analysts for several reasons, among which are her method of observation, her sense that she was accessing the earliest levels of experience and her assumption of the infant's passive dependence on the object. However, two of Hinshelwood's comments, regarding the importance of the external world and of the interaction for skin formation, may be considered, from a different point of view, as an opportunity for education to get closer to psychoanalysis. According to Hinshelwood: To most Kleinians, Bick's work points to a very strong emphasis on the external world as the prime determinant of the earliest development of the personality, and this has led to Bick being largely ignored by them... . The emphasis that the method gives to the sequence between mother, then baby, then mother, etc, lays stress on the interaction. There is, despite Bick's concern with the intra-psychic, a concentration upon interpersonal phenomena... . This contrasts with the accepted view that psycho-analysis addresses intra-psychic processes inside a person. (1997, p 312)

The external world and interaction are the main resources education has available to develop its tasks and reach its aims. Besides the importance of Bick's idea in itself, therefore, her "interpersonal" approach to the intra-psychic creates a fruitful environment for the overlap between these two fields.

Lucas and Luis, the two subjects of this study, well illustrate the importance of Bick's contribution (Bick, 1964, 1968, 1986). The boys are 8 and 9 years old, respectively. At first glance, they seem very autonomous, doing what they want, when they want, at school. They are physically more active than the other children of the same age, and often more violent, although they are not perceptibly taller or stronger. But they do not take any of the usual sorts of advantage from this, such as the leadership in PE lessons or even the adoption of a protective image. On the contrary, it seems to make them more isolated, as their reactions are not predictable and appear threatening to the other children.

Lucas and Luis have not achieved any progress in written language and are barely able to write their own first names correctly. They seem to take letters as isolated objects, although they have a vague idea of their being meaningful when put together. Concerning oral communication, Luis is slightly more able to hold a conversation than Lucas, which is to say that he can bear listening to another's comments and questions for longer than Lucas. However, their manner and degree of engagement is quite different from that of the other children of their age. The sentences they say and the information they give seem to be motivated mostly by inner and unknown connections rather than by the interaction with another speaker. In addition to this, they often swear at their fellow students for no apparent reason. Their approach to drawing is also revealing. As soon as they start drawing a picture, they begin tracing lines within the drawing as if cutting it into smaller pieces. The object created is then disintegrated, but this is unintentional: the idea is not to destroy it, for it looks as if they think they are improving it. While drawing, they make a few comments about their pictures, as though they are increasing the level of detail in the picture; or, in other words, as though they are seeking to beautify it, or to make it more sophisticated. It is unclear whether they have a notion of what would make something more sophisticated, and, as such, it is not clear whether this word applies to what they are doing. The question that has to be asked concerns the nature of the dynamics that have led these children to behave in the manner described. Bick's idea of skin formation and second skin formation may be helpful, as evidenced by some aspects observed in the research process that will be explored below.

What I want to stress about these children is that they seem to be missing a very primitive link, a link that is ideally (and metaphorically) achieved in a mother–infant relationship.² What they lack is a sense of coherence that would integrate them. In other words, they need the sense of boundary that should have been developed through the process of skin formation. They do look for it desperately and actively, although they do not know what they are looking for and where to get it from. As a consequence of this, they undertake a frantic search that does not put them into a real relationship straightaway. Their behaviour is more a result of the lack of boundaries than a proper attempt to relate to people. What has been highlighted here is that, in spite of the first impression of their very active behaviour, they experience life passively, as they wait for something or someone to draw a connection with and for them, and to fulfil their needs. That is to say, the passivity towards relationships and more broadly towards life, which is related to an impaired skin formation, is the main aspect to be taken into account and to be understood.

The second skin formation prevents them from fully introjecting and projecting and, therefore, from having a sense of belonging. As they are alienated from others, they do not find out what relationships need in order to be strengthened and to go on. Despite impressions, and contrary to what teachers normally think, there is no hidden agenda of getting the teachers' attention or disturbing their work by being harmful or nasty. These children are in a state of being "at sea"; they have no idea of what their behaviour elicits and what is about to happen to them. They wait for others to guide them to the next step. This is the reason why people can seem so intrusive to them. Although they are usually seen as not only protected against but also aggressive towards people, they do not have this primitive protection, the lack of which makes them deeply vulnerable and easily subjected to the attitudes of others. In other words, although they are muscularly protected, these children's minds have no protection.

Vignette 1 (my observations)

When I come into the room, the students are seated in a semi-circle and are all listening to the teacher reading a story about Father Christmas. I look around in order to find a seat and notice that Lucas has his eyes on me. We have brief but direct eye contact and he gives me a great smile. For a fraction of a second we share this contact, but I withdraw my eyes from his, and he responds with an expression of disappointment and frustration. When the teacher finishes the story, Lucas starts to mess around, jumping and cartwheeling. Another child follows him but not for long. He hits some of his fellow students and offends them verbally. The teacher asks him to stop, but he remains in the centre gesticulating and causing disturbance.

Eye contact seems to play a key role in Lucas' disturbance. His mother is not able to look at anybody and I imagine she was not responsive to Lucas' gaze in his early stages. Eye contact is a means for him to identify something he does not recognize as himself, but that contributes to his sense of skin. Lucas is especially looking for something in me and in nobody else, which makes me feel that he needs primitive links. When I break the link, it is, as Hinshelwood (Personal communication, 7 February, 2004) suggested, as if I dropped the baby. The lack of coherence in himself makes him feel as if he is going to pieces. It is the eye contact that enables him to find a container, which he feels he loses when I withdraw. After that, he behaves as if he had burst his own body and was flowing into the space of the classroom. The denial of his gaze seems to be as harmful as the denial of the experience of skin.

Vignette 2 (my observation)

When Lucas comes back, I ask him to write something and he tries writing his name LCAS (instead of LUCAS). I ask him whether I can write something on his notebook. He agrees and I write O LUCAS E LEGAL (Lucas is cool). He barely recognizes his name and concludes that the last word is his name as well. I read what is written slowly. He smiles in a very pleasant way, goes to his desk and copies this phrase several times. As his writings go on, he misses some letters and gets others out of order.

He shows what he has written to the teacher, who does not pay attention. He comes and shows it to me. I then write and read to him: EU GOSTO DA MINHA PROFESSORA (I like my teacher). He runs to his desk and copies it several times. Again, he misses the letters and the order of them.

Vignette 3 (observation made by the research assistant)

Lucas is sitting at his desk. He writes BOLO (cake) and shows this to the research assistant. She gives him the okay and he continues to copy. A few minutes later, he shows her his notebook again. As the research assistant is not concentrating on him, he calls to her with a psi, psi sound. She looks at him, smiles and he smiles back. She asks him to go on, and he continues. He does it once more, and she says that the recipe is for his mother. He asks her to write his mother's name down. She does so and he copies it in his notebook really carefully. Suddenly, he writes many words as if he were copying from the blackboard. But they are no more than disconnected letters, put all very close to each other. He shows it to the research assistant and asks her to write her name down.

Vignette 4 (my observation)

I ask Luis whether he likes stories and he nods. Then we start to look at the illustration in the book. There is a witch whom he calls a clown, some bottles, which he says contain spirits; the coffee pot, which is called glass; a hexagon, which he calls round; some paintbrushes, which he calls cigarettes; and a pair of roller skates, which he calls a pram.

Vignette 5 (observation made by the research assistant)

Luis keeps walking around the classroom. Suddenly, for no reason, he says to me (research assistant): Listen to what I've learned: "Hi, bye, Merry Christmas" (and shows her his middle finger).

I react as if I were disappointed and he smiles.

Vignette 6 (my observation in the one-to-one encounter)

Luis says that he wants to draw a house, and he carefully draws a roof consisting of the gable end, ridgeline and the facing roof area, in a reasonable perspective. The picture is easily recognizable for what it is. But at this point, rather than putting the house underneath it, or adding detail, he begins to draw diagonal straight lines within the outline of the roof, creating a pattern of small triangles so that the image becomes unidentifiable. (He did this on five occasions and will only draw anything else – a person and a tree – if I specifically ask).

Language is a structure that supports the flow of thoughts and feelings and enables the individual to share them with others. That is to say, it is a container for general social meaning but also needs a containing mind where it can be processed and re-created as personal. There must be a sense of mutuality for the person to be able to contain parts of an object and to make use of these parts to produce another unity. Only by doing that will the person be able both to express himself and to share the reality. The only way the object will be useful and productive is for it to be introjected as such. For Lucas and Luis, however, letters and words have not been introjected either as parts of a whole or as symbols that only make sense as a whole. Moreover, as there is no linking process binding the parts, words do not seem to be in close relation to objects and ideas.

The first containing object, which was not experienced as containing, impaired the development of a mind able to work both with boundaries and as a boundary. Hence, the bits of the objects leak, as do pieces of the self. This "leaking process" can also be seen in moments when the children swear at their friends for no reason, and when they draw. Their frantic bodies – seen in their chaotic behaviour – and their difficulty with representations and symbolization, seen in their tendency to copy in their drawings, and in their inappropriate use of language, are examples of the continuous "leaking" trickle of their pieces.

Some findings from the one-to-one relationship

The experience of the one-to-one relationship during the research made it evident that these children can recognize, value and benefit from the containing process. If one has it in mind to be a good container and an integrative model, positive experiences, although sometimes painful, may take place. Obviously, the evidence is still insufficient to tell us whether a similar environment and relationship could be developed in the classroom and whether this would enable the children to learn more. Further investigation is needed. However, the evidence shows that some different patterns of behaviour and attitudes are eventually experienced, and these can be used as guidelines for a more ambitious proposal.

Vignette 7 (fifth encounter)

Luis had told the research assistant that an older girl (he did not know her age) had invited him to go to bed and that they had made "you know...those things...". When we meet, he says that he would like to tell me something. He says it is a sort of thing "you shouldn't tell anybody", and he behaves in a very ambivalent but also lop-sided way. He oscillates between an ironic "I'm the best"-like attitude and a slight "I'm hurt"-like behaviour, as if he were assessing my reaction in order to define his. As time goes by and he introduces the story bit by bit, he looks very upset, and I ask whether he feels guilty. He nods, adding that it was a sad story.

Vignette 8 (sixth encounter)

Luis tells me that he is living with his aunt (after some time, I realized that Luis had brought up some fragments of this story before, saying that his aunt would drop him somewhere. As I was curious, I tried to keep the conversation going, but he withdrew, as he normally does). He says he does not miss his family because he does not like to be hit. He says that up until some time ago, during the period he lived with his mother, he had night-bladder incontinence and he had to have cold showers (as punishment) when he wet his bed. He also says that the incontinence had ended since he started living with his aunt. I ask whether he was subjected to other sorts of punishment and he says that he had to remain kneeling until his mother decided that it was enough. If he did not remain on his knees, she would hit him.

Vignette 9 (fourth encounter)

Lucas had a problem before we met. Someone had hit a boy and the teacher assumed it was Lucas. She made him apologize to the whole class. As I arrive, she is going upstairs with him and says to me: Are you going to use him today? (she used this unusual term – use) You have to wait, because he hurt one of my students and, as he doesn't accept it is his fault, I'll make him have a chat with my whole class. When Lucas is back to his classroom, he remains seated with his head hidden in his arms on the desk. When I come into the class, he looks at me, and, for a while, he seems to be glad that I am there. But he does not come to me. I go towards him and say that I will be waiting for him to decide whether he wants to meet or not. I leave the room and wait outside. He abruptly stands up and leaves the room with an expression of fury. He almost runs over me without saying a word and goes to the toilets. His sister is there and she knows he is furious. She looks at me and makes an expression like: uh, he's really out of control! There is a big can full of water and he kicks it violently. He goes into one toilet and locks it, then climbs the wall and leaves the cubicle locked. His sister asks him to stop and he swears loudly. She runs to her classroom. I am with him but he does not seem to see anything or anybody before him. He follows his sister and kicks the door of her classroom violently, and then goes in. The teacher urges him to leave the class. I try to contain him physically,³ but he is really strong and violent. He tries to kick my feet out from under me. He goes to the window and hits the glass. I reach him and prevent him from breaking it and hurting himself. He tries to make me fall again, and I say that he can try as hard as he can, but I will not allow him to hurt himself. I also say that I would be stronger than he, if necessary, to protect him. He progressively calms down, to the point where I can say that we still have some time to spend together if he wishes. He does not answer and, as he is safe with the playground supervisor, I tell him that I will be in the room, in case he wants to go there. As soon as he walks in, he takes something from the cupboard, as if he were robbing it. He looks at the toys and says: I'm not a gay to play with this silly doll. He is underneath the table. I try to touch him and he does not allow me to do so, but in quite a playful way. I try again and he smiles. He leaves the thing he had taken from the cupboard, and when I try to take it, he takes it first. We are playing a sort of mother-and-son hide-and-seek game. He smiles at every repetition of this game (more like an eight-month-old baby than an eight-year-old boy). He looks at a picture that is on another table and asks: Who is that ugly person? I say that he is feeling so bad that he thinks everything and everybody is ugly. He cuts out a paper kite and colours it purple and yellow. Meanwhile, he says that he is going to go to his sister's classroom. I follow him, saying that I would love to learn how to make a kite. He assumes a sort of responsibility and begins to show me how to proceed. I ask whether learning is difficult. He says yes and concludes: Sums are more difficult. Me: Would you like me to help you with your learning? He: Yes. Me: Would you like to write kite? He: Yes. And I start to write O LUCAS SABE FAZER PIPA (Lucas knows how to make a kite). He smiles and begins making some simple origami (balloon, airplane and hat) in order to give to me. He asks whether his sister has also met me. I say no (subsequently, he would ask this each time we met).

What must be stressed is that, in spite of their passivity and the chaos they experience, these children seem to be able to engage progressively, as long as they have some containing experience to hold on to. This is why, despite their fragmented states, they could not be seen as psychotic. This engagement seems to evoke the following: (1) a wider interest in and a growing ability to converse; (2) a better recognition of the importance of relationships and, consequently, a greater capacity to maintain and develop a relationship – by teaching something they know, by trusting and telling about themselves, by allowing themselves to express and feel emotions, even painful ones.

Thinking about school

If the school's primary task is to be preserved, it has to be borne in mind that school is not a consulting room, and, therefore, teachers have a specific context, different goals and different tools to use when dealing with "problem" children. But education might learn from some assumptions the psychoanalytic method makes about the subject: (1) first of all, the assumption of the existence of the unconscious, as this awareness brings the dimension of unknown and unintentional motivations to understanding the child's behaviour; (2) the need for the child to hear something meaningful, something that, as a consequence of the former assumption, is not merely a reasonable and sensible explanation of what he has done wrong or what does not fit the social values or the school rules; (3) the purpose of the interaction is to integrate, to enrich and to strengthen the child's inner world; (4) the acknowledgement that not only ideas but also emotions take place in one's mind and, consequently, in relationships; and (5) the need for those in charge of the child to have enough internal space, which both enables the former to truly listen to the latter and to represent the skin, so that the child can differentiate his own internal space from the other's (as external space). As already stated, these ideas have to be framed within the educational field, without jeopardizing the primary educational task, that is, these cannot implicitly convert education into therapy (interpreting rather than teaching), or make staff play a mother role (and provide dependency needs).

What I would ambitiously suggest, and expect to be the object of further studies, is that, in order to prevent education from disrespecting its nature, but still offer the students the containing mind that some of them are lacking, the work to be developed at school should enable teachers to intervene on the implicit messages behind the explicit behaviour. This would mean that teachers can learn to help reorganize the fragments that the child is expelling and, to some extent, learn to give them back in a more tolerable form that provides a deeper comprehension of the fragments. Rather than interpreting the unconscious contents and anxieties directly, what is being suggested is that teachers could interpret in what shape the child's fragments would make a better sense of unity for him. This would be a more descriptive approach to the child's difficulties, and yet still helpful. The promotion of a certain recognition of what has gone into pieces would be the pedagogic tool for making tolerable and more integrated what has been expelled. This would enable the child to delimit and organize his own internal space, so that he can reintroject those parts and, hopefully, the parts he needs in order to learn. What I am suggesting – which I will call the process of parroting – is a means of being a good container without being intrusive to the child: a way to help the child listen to what goes on within himself. In other words, parroting is a means of doing what Millar (D. Millar, personal communication, 2 February 2004) brilliantly called "verbalizing the observation" or "honouring the truth".

The fragmented self tends to drift away. Teachers tend to judge it as bad behaviour and tend to behave as badly as the children, trying to persuade them by forcing on them values and moral ideas of good and bad, right and wrong. As the children are in pieces and are incapable of feeling themselves as a unity, as having inner space, they are also unable to identify with anything that comes from the outside, unless it addresses one of the fragments that has come momentarily to the fore. If we bear in mind that at second skin formation there is a pseudo-independence (Bick, 1986), which makes introjections of external objects even more difficult, then the first step for teachers trying to help the children is not to add any further burden on them, but to share what they have said in a more cognitively and socially organized way.

The parroting approach could metaphorically be expressed as follows: The child would say: "Listen to what I'm saying, that's me, these are fragments of myself. I cannot bear and contain what I am." And by parroting, the adult would reply: "Listen to what you've said. There is a unity if we bind the parts. And this unity may not be unbearable at all, though you feel differently". The dynamic described in the encounter with Lucas, where we were able to make a kite following his outburst (Vignette 9), illustrates this, as it progresses from the violent expulsion of fragments of Lucas to the possibility – through the use of parroting – of piecing together those fragments and verbalizing feelings relating to difficulties with learning.

What I have found is that, when they are in contact with a containing mind, children such as Lucas and Luis can progressively develop the capacity to hear about their difficulties in learning, their wish to overcome it and their fear of not being able to do so. Obviously, I am not saying that this is enough to solve the problems they have at school. But I am firmly stating that schools should make the attempt to look at these children from this point of view.

In order to do that, the teachers need to be able to "be with" the child; to grasp that there is something painful going on with the child (rather than being sure that the child wants to drive him or her mad); to learn from the experience and "think under fire"; trying to find what else lies behind the child's behaviour; to know the difference between containing the parts of the other's self (allowing the other to have it back in a more bearable way) and forcing them back by being intrusive; and finally, to be able to bear this painful process, to be able to be with somebody who is suffering (to be a good container, to be aware of and careful with the counter-transference).

What can be done for schools to develop and support teachers' work is, in a broad view, to give the institution support for the anxiety that arises from the work (especially when staff work with children in trouble), and to give teachers some conceptual and methodological support in understanding what goes on beyond the pedagogy, or better, beyond the difficulties in learning. This would be done by training teachers in child observation, training teachers in not being intrusive, training teachers on "being with" children, that is, on being able to connect with them, and training them to be a proper container for their anxiety, in order to help the children establish the very first link without which no interactive process – learning processes included – takes place.

What I am proposing would neither interfere with nor endanger the educational project. On the contrary, it would prevent educational intervention from becoming a mere intrusion of external normative and cognitive or moral-oriented explanations that the child is not protected against or prepared for, given the child's absence of skin. By following the approach suggested, the teachers would be able to help children create an inner space for thinking and learning, which, in any case, should be one of the school's principal objectives.

Final comments

This work shed light on the processes that take place in the children's internal space but that are in interaction with social processes. As a social and "humane" institution, in possession of helpful tools such as those suggested here, I firmly believe that the school may contribute to helping these children in trouble to have a more challenging, integrative, affective and effective experience at school. The two children quoted here do not have the boundary that makes them able to distinguish between what comes from inside and what from the outside. Statements, attitudes or even minds that are not aimed at linking their fragments are doomed to be felt either as an abstraction (which means one more meaningless piece among others, that, as such, tend to be ignored), or, worse, as an invasive way to destroy the fluid, fragile and hence precious sense of self they barely maintain and that prevents them from being in a strict psychotic state.

Notes

¹ This article was written thanks to a grant for a post-doctoral research project, financed by Fapesp (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo – São Paulo State Fund for Research) – Brazil; and it was edited by Anna Pruetzel-Thomas.

² This bond is meant to take place at the very early stages of the child's life as a foundation for further developments; however, it can also be developed, improved or, conversely, deteriorated through bonds created later as the individual confronts different social experiences. The relevance of mentioning the condition of social exclusion in which these children grow up has to do with the fact that this situation tends to affect and severely worsen the already existing difficulties, because, as mentioned above, they reinforce the fragmentation experience. This discussion, however, relates to another area of the problem, which will be the subject of further research.

³ In order to dispel any misunderstandings, it is important to note that this research has been undertaken in Brazil, where physical contact between teachers and pupils in lower grades (1st to 4th year) is not illegal and is not condemned as improper or immoral. Hugging and kissing pupils is common, usual and acceptable behaviour.

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About the Author

Ana Archangelo is a professor at the Faculty of Education at UNICAMP (State University of Campinas – Brazil) where she teaches Psychology of Education. She belongs to the research group "Differences and Subjectivity in Education" and her research interests focus on Social Exclusion, Psychoanalysis and Education. She has written papers and articles which have been published in books and national and international journals.