Transference and Resistance in the Basic Writing Classroom: Problematics and Praxis

Abstract

Surely every instructor of composition-especially those of us involved with remedial or Basic Writing-has experienced moments of doubt and gloom in which the meanings implicit in Freud's famous comparison of impossible professions seem all too inescapable. For like psychoanalysis, our work helping students to find their voices frequently brings us face to face with a dense array of demons-fears, resistances, angers, and traumas-in our students and in ourselves. Indeed, the sub-text or latent content of a composition classroom often threatens utterly to overthrow the more cognitive dimension of our work. In encouraging our students to unlock and express their ideas, feelings, and beliefs more effectively, we are, like psychoanalysts, insisting that they confront lost or denied elements of themselves-itself a project filled with social, familial, and personal dangers-and then that they express those elements in written, often alien discourse, the very use of which arouses a whole new host of terrors.