Siegfried Bernfeld, Sisyphus: Or, the Limits of Education

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"'"'- ....... .... - .., .. _., .... ,. ... -... - .....-,_- A Quantum Book WITH A FOREWORD BY ANNA FREUD AND A PREFACE BY PETER PARET SISYPHUS OR THE LIMITS OF EDUCATION by Siegfried Bernfeld Translated fr~m the German by Frederic Lilge Foreword by Anna Freud Preface by Peter Paret SiegfriedBernfeld (1892-1953) was a highly regarded member of Sigmund Freud's inner circle, who in 1927 settled in San Francisco, where he continued his career as a distin guished analyst and teacher. Freud called him "an outstanding expert of psychoanalysis, the strongest head among my students and fol lowers, an extremely 'powerful teacher." · In this book, originally published in 1925, Be_rnfeid projects the outline of a future sci ence of education. His conception of science, however, has little in common with behavior ist conditioning as currently exemplified by Burrhus F. Skinner. It is much. broader and does not eliminate individual responsibility for human growth. Bernfeld urges the mem bers of the educational profession to learn the psychic and social realities of their work, or see their labors ~ondemned to the futility of Sisyphus. He is especially critical of the limit less and narcissistic idealism of the so-called great educators who built their theories around noble ends without coming to terms with. the means of their realization. Bernfeld's account of psychic reality is de rived from Freud, and reminds the educator that an inescapable element of all education is the inhibition of instinctual drives and their redirection toward cultural goals. Such redi rection generates crises and frustrations that must be accepted as a necessary part of hu man growth. The social realities Bernfeld views in the perspective of Marx: ideologies that employ education in the exploitative interests of mi- ..... l SIEGFRIED BERNFELD Sisyphus or The Limits of Education )I Translated by Frederic Lilge Foreword by Anna Freud Preface by Peter Paret UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY,LOSANGELES,LONDON Contents Foreword by Anna Freud vu Preface by Peter Paret ix Original German title: Sisyphos oder die Grenzen der Erziehung Translator's Note xxix Published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1967. I. On the Theory and Philosophy of Education I Originally published by Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Leipzig, Wien, Zi.irich, 1925. II. The Preconditions and Function of Education 3 I University of California Press III. Ways, Means, and Possibilities of Education 84 Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1973, by The Regents of the University of California ISBN: o-po-o14o7-3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-84784 Printed in the United States of America Designed by Jean Peters Foreword In the book before us, first published in 1925, Siegfried Bernfeld discusses problems of education which have not changed much during the intervening years. The educa tional theoreticians with their ideals and hopes are as far removed from practical reality as they were half a century ago. Education itself is as limited as it was then by the given personalities of the adults in charge of children, by the personalities of the children themselves and by the social environment within which their growing up takes place. Also, what the author calls the "constants" of education are still with us, i.e. the adults' loving and aggressive atti tudes towards children. Parents and educators search as before for the balance between praise and punishment, per missiveness and frustration which is most likely to promote growth. It hardly needs mention that also another of the author's contentions remains valid: that the educational systems as such, far from being revolutionary, are always conservative, in so far as they represent a society's attempts to transmit its values to the next generation. Nevertheless there are changes since Siegfried Bernfeld's time in the spread of knowledge concerning child develop ment. The psychoanalytic tenets of child psychology which vii r: he quotes tentatively and carefully as the new information il' on which better education might be based, have grown and increased and represent now a formidable body of knowl II edge. Guided by them, we come closer to realising the possi bilities and impossibilities of changing the instinctual na ture of the child and of assessing the benefits as well as the possible damage done to it by educational interference. These are advances to be welcomed. They will be all the more beneficial if we approach them and make use of them Preface: sisYPHus AND ITs AUTHOR in the same spirit of criticism and scepticism which per vades the present book and gives it its especial value. When Sisyphus was published in 1925, Siegfried Bernfeld, still in his early thirties, had already written half a dozen books on such seemingly diverse subjects as the psychology of infants and adolescents, Zionism, education, and psycho 1. i I analytic theory and method. This variety did not reflect a I fragmentation of thought; as Bernfeld treated it, each I theme bore on the others, and all were marked by an acute I' sense of social responsibility that had found in psycho I Anna Freud is director of the Hampstead Child-Therapy Course and Clinic in London. analysis a prerequisite for changing society: the means of understanding human nature. The books and the many articles that accompanied them were not solely the pro ducts of speculation but also of varied and intensely felt practical experience. Since his student days before 1914, Bernfeld had been an organizer of youth movements, edi tor, academic psychologist, soldier, functionary in Jewish organizations, commandant of the Jewish self-defense force in Vienna during the 1918 revolution, founder of an experi mental school, practicing analyst, and a teacher of psycho analysis. To some degree, Sisyphus bears the imprint of all these activities. It is a compressed statement of ideas that its author had developed and applied since his adolescence -and a highly combative statement at that. A reviewer of viii ix the first edition called the book "a blast on the last trumpet sand members from German and Austrian universities and for authoritarian teachers and also for that new breed of secondary schools.2 The A. C. S. was inspired by the views of educators proclaiming the gospel of love." That was too Gustav Wyneken, the prophet of progressive education in optimistic; but Sisyphus did have a permanently liberating Germany, who regarded students as the pioneers of a spiri influence on many of its readers, and the book retains its tual and cultural regeneration, a renewal that Wyneken, in significance as a document of the times and as one of the this respect representative of most of the German youth more provocative diagnoses of the ills and possibilities of movement before 1914, saw in apolitical terms. Bernfeld pedagogy in the history of education. Its historical charac tried to underpin Wyneken's rather mystic, bourgeois ideal ter, like that of all successful intellectual efforts, is com of a new youth culture with the beginnings of a coherent II bined with a strong relevance to the present. psychology of puberty, and added to it a socialistic program Bernfeld was born in 1892, the son of a Jewish wholesale of education that called for the destruction of middleclass merchant established in Vienna.1 After acquiring a sound domination of the schools. In schools and universities Gymnasium education, he entered the University of Vi A. C. S. chapters spread their message of the equality of the enna, where he studied biology, social and educational psy sexes, the injustice of class differences, the need to emanci chology, and mathematics. When he was twenty-one he pate youth from the values of the adult world. A journal !I published his first psychoanalytically oriented paper, "On with the hopeful title Der Anfang printed contributions by :II' the Unconscious Determination of the Thought-Process: A A. C. S. members, which, Wyneken and Bernfeld expected, i' Self-Observation," and began to experiment with self would contain reliable information about the feelings and i analysis and the analysis of dreams and symptoms of fellow needs of young people and lead to a common program of 11i students. Although himself exceptionally successful in his action. Among its regular authors was the young Walter II: academic work, he came to believe that too frequently edu Benjamin, who only recently, decades after his death, has II! cational institutions distorted the processes of learning and been recognized as one of Germany's most interesting crit :li

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