The Psychodynamics of Star Wars

“A long time ago in a galaxy far away…” So begins the opening “crawl” of

Star war movies. These movies invite us to consider them as evocations of an ancient legend that explain the origins and foundation of the world we have inherited and as we know it today. In this blog post I would like to take this conceit seriously, namely to examine Star Wars as a modern myth or origin story that sheds light on our current experiences. The risk in doing this is to take what is after all an entertainment vehicle and commercial undertaking far too seriously. On the other side, the franchise’s persistence over thirty years in films and books, its world wide popularity, and its trafficking in the fundamental themes of good and evil should give us pause enough to consider it seriously, as we might the legends of the Greek gods, the Norse heroes of the Wagner Ring Cycle, or even the portraits of the patriarchs in the Bible.

C.J. Jung suggested that myths could be seen as social dreams through which our shared arc of life, from birth to death, is expressed through universal archetypes, for example, mother, father, child, devil, trickster, wise old man or hero. If we accept this idea, we could say that Star Wars might be such a myth in which such universal archetypes, for example, Yoda as the wise man, Darth Vader as the devil, the droid as the trickster, and Luke Skywalker as the hero, are joined to our collective preoccupations as we experience them today. The newest film’s casting, The Force Awakens, underlines this feature.  Actors who were young some thirty years ago, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill, reprise their roles, but as older and aging characters. As aging actors they too will recede in importance, as younger actors take up central roles in succeeding films of the Star Wars franchise. Older filmgoers, watching this latest movie, can come into touch with their own aging. Let’s for the sake of argument assume that this mythical and archetypical frame of reference is relevant, and see what insights this point of departure affords us.

The Disordered family and cosmos

A striking feature of the most recent Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, is that the cosmos is disturbed because family relationships are disordered.  Failed family relationships are evident throughout the movie. For example, the new female heroine, Rey, whom the film suggests will succeed Luke Skywalker as the next great Jedi warrior, has been orphaned early in life, separated from her parents as the result of some traumatic and perhaps political event. When we encounter her early in the movie she methodologically records every day she has been separated from her parents by markings on a wall, as if she were in prison. In addition, Kylo Ren, the grandson of Darth Vader and the son of Hans Solos and Princess Leia (now a general in the Republic), is estranged from his parents. In addition, Solo and the Princess are estranged from each other, most likely because they have lost their son, Kylo Ren, to the dark side. Also, Luke Skywalker has vanished from the face of the galaxy and is thus estranged from his sister Princess Leia and all of those who have depended on him as the Jedi representative of his generation.  Finally, as the Fore Awakens informs us, Luke Skywalker once trained Kylo Ren to become a Jedi, thus acting as both his guru and as father figure. When Ren went over the dark side, precipitating Skywalker’s withdrawal, the two became estranged permanently.

Now in the life of a small child, a disturbed family life is indeed a cosmic disturbance. In this sense Star Wars evokes a child’s feeling that parental conflict can literally unravel his or her world. But the bridge from the cosmos to the family has adult meaning as well, insofar as we believe that the foundation stone for civilization is the orderly family. In psychoanalysis the figure of the father, or more broadly, the paternal function, personifies this linkage. The father introduces his children to the demand that they control their impulses in order to take up their roles first in school and then in society. We know that children who grow up without fathers, are more likely to drop out of school, abuse drug and alcohol, have more problems with aggression, are twice as likely to commit suicide, and for boys, are more likely to commit crimes. In short, children in such families are more likely to feel overwhelmed. As they mature, their powerlessness may lead to feelings of despair, one reason why they are more likely to commit suicide or crimes.

There is a pivotal emotional moment in the film, when Kylo Ren kills his father, Hans Solo on the Starkiller base. Solo spots Ren from behind walking across a narrow footbridge on the base and calls to him by his original name “Ben” (named after Ben Kenobi). They see each other for the first time after years of estrangement. Solo shows emotional strength in reaching out to Ren. Yet on the other side, he is foolishly risking his life in trying to make contact with his son. After all, at that moment they are antagonists. Kylo is looking for Rey and her droid, while Solo is protecting them. Should Kylo find the droid he could locate Luke Skywalker’s hiding place in the galaxy and destroy him, eliminating the latter’s potential role as a tutor to the next generation of Jedi warriors.

Responding to his father’s pleas that he rejoin his family and the light side, Kylo says, “I'm being torn apart. I want to be free of this pain.” One question is what is the source of his pain and why has it led him to such a point of despair that he is being torn apart. One conception is that Ren suffers from the burden imposed by weak fathers and father figures. The weak father is an attenuated version of the absent father. Hans Solo was once a vagabond, a trader who lived at the margin of society making money by dealing with shady characters, borrowing money and not repaying his debts. He attained moral stature by joining the rebels’ fight against the Empire, (Star Wars IV, A new Hope). But in the Force Awakens, (Star Wars VII), he has apparently reverted to his original dubious profession as a merchant and trader on the galaxy’s fringes, partly because Kylo, originally named Ben, has turned to the dark side. When Rey the heroine first meets Hans Solo and asks him if he is in fact the famous Hans Solo, he replies, “I used to be.” On the bridge, when Hans asks Kylo to remove his mask and reveal the face of his son, Kylo replies, “Your son is gone. He was weak and foolish like his father, so I destroyed him.”

One psychoanalytic conception is that a weak father burdens the psychological development of his son. In this conception, every son needs a “strong enough” father to help him gain control over his own impulses. The son identifies with and internalizes his father’s competence and independence. He trades his wish to gratify his impulses for his father’s love and respect. His father and later other figures of authority, whom he both loves and fears, become the precipitates of what Freud called the son’s “superego.” But when the father is weak, the son must become his own internalized policeman. Unmodified by love and respect, his superego becomes unduly harsh charging him to excess with being inadequate, ineffectual and guilty, for this is the only way he can control his impulses. When this experience becomes intolerable, it leads to despair. Under these conditions the son may seek relief by turning over his harsh superego to an overly strong father figure, such as Snoke the leader of the Dark side, who relieves him of his guilt, and assures him of his potency.

One conception is, that at that moment on the bridge, Kylo is caught between two experiences of his father, as loving or weak, as the forgiving father or the fool. This is too painful a tension for him bear. This is why he tells his father that he wants to be “free of this pain.” Then, though first hesitating, he kills his father thus underlining his transition to the dark side. The psychoanalytically tuned viewer may link this scene on the footbridge to the scene in Oedipus Rex in which Oedipus, meeting his father on a narrow road, kills him in a dispute over whose carriage has the right of way.

The dark side and the devil

This link between despair and murder also has religious and mythological roots. Goethe’s story of the Faust legend is the exemplar story here. Faust, despairing of ever reaching a complete understanding of the universe, considers killing himself. He is saved by a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles, who promises to do his bidding in this world if Faust will in turn serve the devil in Hell. When Faust agrees, the devil soon after helps him seduce Gretchen, a woman he finds attractive. Gretchen in turn poisons her own mother so that she and Faust can meet in private. As this drama suggests, the devil permits what is normally forbidden for example, killing for sexual pleasure, an impulse we may at some point entertain in our fantasy but that we would never express in reality.

Examined from a mytho-theological perspective, the Faust story suggests that despair challenges faith, raising the prospect that God, like failed fathers, is weak in this world. If this is true, it suggests that an anti-god or anti-Christ is strong, and in the theology of the western world this is none other than the devil. The devil offers us a road out of despair by promising us potency, if we make good on our crisis of faith and abandon God. If God in turn represents the moral function of the superego, the set of, the “thou shall nots” and “thou shalls” of the Ten Commandments, then as David Bakan argues, the devil suspends the superego, permitting what the superego forbids. This is the religious meaning of the dark side. Snoke as the leader of the dark side is the devil. He frees up his followers, to act out fantasies they would ordinarily keep out of awareness and certainly keep in check for example murdering innocents at will. He relieves them of guilt. This is why his followers feel grateful to him and seek his approval. Broadly speaking, this is the basis for what historians call the “totalitarian seduction.” It is a deal with the devil. This is why Hux, the military leader of the dark side’s storm troopers, sounds like Hitler when he addresses them in a mass rally as they prepare to destroy the resistance’s base. Hitler personifies the devil in modern times.

The emotionally vulnerable man

In some currents of popular culture, when a man or father is moved by his emotions, it is a sign of weakness, an indication that he cannot control his impulses. The Force Awakens initially traffics in this conception. Luke Skywalker upon facing the devastating loss of Kylo Ren and the murder of his Jedi students, is depressed and withdrawn. When we see him --only at the very end of the movie-- we encounter a man all alone and seemingly in despair. Solo, as we have seen, is victimized by his love for his son. Indeed, one of the movie’s conceits is that Kylo Ren is an “incomplete devil,” who becomes inappropriately enraged upon meeting obstacles.

But then the film goes on to offer a more nuanced perspective on the emotionally vulnerable man. The question posed is, can a man’s emotional vulnerability trigger his growth in stature?  In the first Star Wars movie (IV, A New Hope,) the male paragon is the virtuous warrior, the Jedi, a man disciplined enough to risk his life to preserve the Republican and democratic way of life and to do so with equanimity and deliberation.  Obi Wan or Ben Kenobi is the exemplar. In the first Star Wars film, A New Hope he confronts Darth Vader in order to give Skywalker a chance to escape and fulfill his mission of ultimately destroying the Death Star.  Obi Wan understands that Vader, both younger and stronger can kill him. In the middle of their light-sabre battle, knowing he has helped Skywalker escape, he simply accedes to his defeat, saying to Vader, "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

At one level he is predicting his reappearance as a spirit or ghost. Indeed in The Force Awakens, Rey, upon discovering Luke Skywalker’s light sabre in a dungeon-like setting, hears Kenobi’s voice. But in naturalistic terms we can interpret his statement to mean that he will become an ideal, much as Moses or Jesus are, and will inspire other warriors to take up the battle of the dark side with the same courage, equanimity and poise that he has done. The other warrior/pilots of the republic, as befit ordinary heroes, demonstrate a similar grace under fire.

Kenobi has achieved what Freud called sublimation. He has learned to regulate his emotional or instinctual life, which can overpower the rational faculties, by linking them to the work of achieving higher ideals and thereby forgoing immediate gratification in the service of a wider love, what Freud called “Eros.” His control is so complete that he can sacrifice his life for the welfare of a next generation. In a sense, the mantra, “May the force be with you,” may be translated as, “May you appropriate those instincts or drives which animate you, for a greater good.” In this sense Kenobi becomes for the next generation, what Freud called an “ego ideal.” While the superego is the seat of injunctions and the source of guilt, the ego ideal is the seat of aspirations and a source of the capacity to love at a level that goes beyond immediate gratification. 

The newly introduced main character Finn, presents a different picture. Unlike the fighter pilots of the resistance, he initially lacks grace and courage. When we first encounter him as a storm trooper he is overwhelmed by the sight of blood as his fellow troopers kill villagers on the planet Jakku. Fearing that he will get caught for failing to fire his weapon, he deserts his troop, then pretends that he is a Jedi so that Rey will help him in his flight, and finally abandons her -- despite her pleas that he join the resistance- when he can arrange for a flight off the planet. In other words, he is at first a coward and a liar. Finn ultimately grows into a warrior when, upon learning that Kylo Ren has captured Rey, he comes into touch with his love for her, and masters the weapons he must use in an attempt to rescue her. In a sense, Finn is at a lower level of  “warrior development” than a Jedi, because his courage derives from his passion for a person, a woman, rather than from his commitment to an ideal.

A culture of narcissism?

The difference between Obi Wan Kenobi and the men of The Force Awakens highlights the psychoanalytic distinction between the ego and the self. The former describes an executive function of the mind that is aware of its own divisions and ambivalences. It is the way a person observes and controls his own emotional responses to internal as well as external stimuli; for example, by distancing himself from feelings of self-imposed guilt, or taking an ironic stance toward his own passions. Eli Zaretsky, in his wonderful book Political Freud, calls this type of person an exemplar of psychoanalysis’ “maturity ethic”. But in a post-modern age, Zaretsky suggests, we privilege our emotions and put greater value on responding in the moment to them, whether they are noble or not.  

One popular and scholarly conversation suggests that this shift from ego to self highlights a new culture of narcissism where we use our feelings to make peremptory demands on others for recognition and affirmation. For example, students in college classes who demand that they not be exposed to literature that creates discomfort.  Conservative critics worry that such a culture of narcissism with its focus on self-esteem, means that people lack courage and the will to take risks. To them it represents a decline in the masculine elements of the culture as well as a cultural attack on “white males,” and on what they represent and have achieved. This may be why today, Donald Trump, in all his primitivism, is nonetheless appealing.  

The movie presents a different possibility. It suggests that as men take on more “feminine” characteristics, women can take on more masculine ones. The paternal and maternal functions are preserved in our culture but are expressed differently and in new ways by both men and women. This parallelism evokes experiences in every day family life. Fathers are increasingly involved in infant and baby care- changing diapers, feeding, bathing and story telling -- just as mothers are more engaged in the world of work, making good on their ambitions. The hopeful aspect of this vision is that as men mature into their adult character, they will feel less taxed psychologically by the demand that they repress their feminine side, for example by being passive, and for women, the demand that they repress their masculine side, for example by being active. People would feel more psychological freedom and less guilt in taking up their adult roles more fully.  

Rey, the movie’s central character, exemplifies this new role for women.  She represents the next generation of Jedi, the Force flows through her naturally, and as an orphan has learned to defend herself against predators who occupy the frontier settings on her home planet of Jakku. She has mechanical skills, is a self-taught aircraft pilot, and is inspired by the history of the resistance. But she is not a one-dimensional superwoman. She longs for her parents and is drawn to Hans Solo as a potential father figure, a yearning that Kylo Ren, who battles her in a penultimate scene, senses. In the movie’s final moment she finds Luke Skywalker in his mountain hideaway and in a gesture of love returns to him his light saber that, once he had abandoned it, had been stored for some thirty years in a dudgeon/castle on the planet Takodana.

The psychoanalytically tuned viewer may see this as a moment in which a woman returns a phallic object to a man - his weapon -- as the first step in helping to revive his potency. But this is too narrow a “reading” of this moment. I suggest that it is instead a moment of tender reconciliation between the sexes and the generations. It suggests that the daughter cannot be wholly herself without her father and that a man cannot be wholly himself without a woman. In this sense, the very last scene answers the opening chords of the first scenes by offering the prospect that the family unit can be restored so that civilization may once against thrive. It is in this way a romantic ending but not necessarily an unrealistic one.

The Force Awakens leaves me with the question about the meaning of the “warrior” archetype in a post-modern culture. Emerging from the devastation of the twentieth century, a century of two world wars, nationalisms and ideologies, we may be wary of ideals and feel more secure in strengthening our attachments to specific people whom we love and wish to protect. But Star Wars suggests that the dark side is ever present, that the totalitarian seduction, with its political implications, is always just around the corner. This is the warning that Freud offers us in his magisterial, Civilization and its Discontents. Do we take this seriously? If we do, are we prepared?

The Charter School Conflict in New York City: The Psychodynamics of Self-Control

New York City is the site of an angry political and communal dispute about its public school system. For those of my readers from outside the United States, many cities in the U.S., in response to failing public schools,  have developed what is called a “charter school network” as an alternative to the customary public schools.  Charter schools are funded by tax dollars but its teachers and administrators are free, within limits, to design the curriculum according to their best assessment of what children, particularly poor and minority children, need. Some charters are not-for-profit institutions, others are in business to make money while serving children and their parents. They do not have to comply with all of the city’s administrative mandates, and more importantly, the teachers they hire need not be members of the major teacher’s union. This last provision is particularly attractive to some principals and school executives, since they believe that union work rules constrain their ability to create fruitful teaching settings, for example by extending the school day so that children leave at 5 pm rather than at 2 pm. City residents are free to enroll their children in any charter school, but should there be more children applying than there are seats available, admission is determined by lottery. The “Success Academy,” a charter school network, is at the center of the current conflict in New York City. In 2015, 22,000 children applied for 2,688 spots available in the network’s schools. Parents want in.   

The proximate stimulus for the conflict is a fight over money, space and permits. The prior mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, gave the Success Academy network of schools free space in current public school buildings. But the current mayor, Bill Deblasio, has threatened to charge Success Academy for the space they use, while also denying it permits to open more schools in the city. The result has been a nasty public fight between Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of the Success Academy and Mayor Deblasio. Moskowitz has been astute in mobilizing her parents to protest any constraints on the network’s ability to function and expand. For example, she bussed thousands of parents and children to Albany, the capital of New York State, to protest the Mayor’s threatened decisions.

The conflict also provokes some larger conflicts about privilege, social class, power and poverty in New York City, the quintessential global city.  The Success Academy, while supported by public funds, also gets some money from two hedge fund billionaires. Community leaders and activists are suspicious of the latter’s motives, believing that the two are ideologically committed to “marketizing” public services. This process, activists worry, will undermine a community's experience of itself as a group of people with common interests and resources committed to every member’s welfare. Other critics and community leaders worry that these hedge fund executives are exercising arbitrary authority simply because they have the money to influence events, decisions and elections. They seem to be manipulating society to advance their own private ideals or, in one harsh reading, to indulge in a hobby of “doing good” on their own terms and without being held accountable to citizens and the public.

Two YouTube videos (here and here) highlight the political and communal conflict the Academy’s expansion provokes. The city’s Board of Education held a community hearing to consider the question of whether or not a Success Academy school should be allowed to move into a public school building, thereby taking some space from the public school, called, “P.S. 30,” currently housed there. Both proponents and opponents of Success Academy, including many parents, came to the meeting.  As one can see in the video, P.S. 30 parents and teachers refer to the Success Academy as an “invader” and “intruder,” and as a signal of the city’s gentrification. One speaker passionately invokes the history of school segregation, and bemoans the fact that the Success Academy schools are splitting families apart in a form of a “divide and conquer” strategy. “Look at everybody here,” he says, “We have black and Hispanic versus black and Hispanic.” Parents whose children attend the Success Academy heckle the speaker insisting that they have a right to choose which schools their children attend.

Critics of the Success Academy and its pedagogy believe that its schools are punitive and harsh to both students and teachers. As one journalist reports, “Success has stringent rules about behavior, down to how students are supposed to sit in the classroom: their backs straight, and their feet on the floor if they are in a chair, or legs crossed if they are sitting on the floor. The rationale is that good posture and not fidgeting make it easier to pay attention.” In addition, when students take practice tests, to prepare for statewide exams, they cannot go to the bathroom and sometimes wet themselves. Also, “Students who are deemed to not be trying are placed in an ‘effort academy’ which is part detention and part study hall.” 

In addition, students are suspended from the Success Academy schools at a rate higher than is the case in regular public schools. At the Success Academy Harlem 1 school, 23% of the 896 students were suspended for at least one day in 2012-13, the last year for which the state has data. At Public School 149, a school in the same building, 3% of students were suspended during that same period. Moreover, students who take practice tests and succeed get prizes such as remote-controlled cars, arts and crafts kits, and board games. “Former teachers said that they were instructed to keep the prizes displayed in the front of their classroom to keep students motivated.” In addition, as one journalist writes, “At most schools, if a child is flailing academically, it is treated as a private matter. But at Success Academy Harlem 4, one boy’s struggles were there for all to see: On two colored charts in the hallway, where the students’ performance on weekly spelling and math quizzes was tracked, his name was at the bottom, in a red zone denoting that he was below grade level.”  Finally, as the reporter notes, “A teacher complained that she was expected to announce all of her students’ scores on practice tests, by asking those who had scored a four to stand up, followed by those with a three and then those with a two. The teacher and her colleagues persuaded their supervisors not to make students with a score of one stand up, but those students were still left conspicuously sitting down, she said.”  Responding to the claim that the Success Academy schools were unduly harsh, Moskowitz, the CEO, told a reporter, “We cannot let up on them (the students). Any scholar who is not using the plan of attack will go to effort academy, have their parent called, and will miss electives. This is serious business.”

Let’s accept for the moment that the culture is harsh, though I believe that as a primary descriptor of the setting, this charge is one-sided. Many observers, and more importantly parents, are persuaded that Success Academy’s teaching and administrative bring order and calm to what is often a chaotic setting. Conduct that seems harsh and unforgiving may also represent a teacher’s total commitment to a student’s success and a belief in his or her ability. A reporter for the New Yorker writes, “At Success, the school year is ten months long and the school days stretch from 7:45 A.M. to 5 P.M. for those in fifth grade or higher. Similarly, one parent writes, “As soon as you enter the doors, one senses there is something different. Teachers are on their toes, politely and efficiently directing where you need to go. All are well dressed, well informed and carry themselves with an absolute commitment to providing the best possible education for students in attendance at one of the 14 Success Academies in New York City. This isn't to say one couldn't find this kind of enthusiasm in a different kind of school, but it's rare. Personally, there are only two times I have ever seen it: as a teacher and staff member for Teach for America, and walking through the doors of a Success Academy school.” Success Academy students are also exposed to more art, music, chess and physical play than comparable students in public schools.  Moreover, they are encouraged to talk as much as possible. “‘We’re not big on hand-raising here,’ Moskowitz said.’”

Most importantly, the Academy’s schools are successful. An independent university based evaluation of 3^rd graders’ achievement in the network’s first school in Harlem found that the students did better on tests of math and language competence than students who had applied to the school but had not won a seat through the lottery.

In addition, “Last year, sixty-four per cent of the third grade students at Success Academy Harlem 5 passed the state English exam and eighty-eight per cent passed the state math exam. At Public School 123, the Mahalia Jackson School, which is located in the same school building as Success, only eighteen per cent of students passed the English test and only five per cent passed the math test.”

If we grant the Success Academy the benefit of the doubt, that it is successful, the question is what meaning can we make of the sometimes harsh discipline the school imposes on its students. One straightforward hypothesis is that discipline is one vehicle for helping students develop self-control. My readers may recall the famous “marshmallow test” in which pre-school aged children are presented with a challenge: “Sit in front of a marshmallow alone in a room for 15 minutes. If you don’t eat it you will get two marshmallows. If you do eat it, you only get the one in front of you.”  The experiment’s originator, Walter Mischel, found that children who passed the test were more successful as adults. As one journalist writes, “Follow-up studies on these preschoolers found that those who were able to wait the 15 minutes were significantly less likely to have problems with behavior, drug addiction or obesity by the time they were in high school, compared with kids who gobbled the snack in less than a minute. The gratification-delayers also scored an average of 210 points higher on the SAT.” (An entrance exam for college applicants.)

The link between self-control and achievement is readily apparent. A precondition for achieving any worthwhile goal is the ability to not only delay gratification, but more importantly, to tolerate pain, frustration and difficulty. The pain is a measure of the work required for success. This suggests that Success Academy’s disciplined approach would have merit for poor and minority children insofar as they are less able than their middle or upper class peers, to control their impulses. Certainly, many risk factors that shape a child’s ability to control their own behavior affect poor and minority children negatively. 

For example, “Children whose parents, particularly mothers, have greater formal education are better able to exhibit self-control in social and school settings. Mothers with lower educational attainment have children who perform worse on tests of self-regulation..while other studies have found that higher educational status for both parents positively predicted behavioral regulation. Moreover, “The available literature indicates that minority status may be a risk factor for lower self-regulation. When controlling for a host of risk variables, Sektnan et al. (2010) found that being African American was significantly correlated with lower self-regulation in kindergarten.”

There are probably several channels through which risk factors, such as poverty and race, shape a young child’s capacity for self-control. For example, children in single parent, poor families, may experience their setting as unreliable and untrustworthy. They don’t believe, based on their experience, that by delaying gratification and tolerating pain they will garner rewards. In addition, children who internalize their parent’s experience of victimhood, one possible result of settings shaped by institutional racism, may feel unworthy. This means that they don’t expect to be treated fairly; to be rewarded commensurate with their effort. In addition, surveys document that African American parents use more physical discipline than their white counterparts, partly because they believe that their children live in higher risk settings, where misdeeds and mistakes are more likely to expose them to predators. To be “no-nonsense” parents, they physically discipline their children preemptively to keep them out of a larger harm’s way.

But physical discipline tactics can short circuit a child’s development of self-control. The child learns to avoid the parent rather than to modify his or her own behavior. The parent is not experienced as a figure to be admired and imitated, but as one to be feared.  

Finally, it is a well-established finding that children in poor households are exposed to 30 million fewer words by the time they are three-years-old than children from high-income households. But one way in which children develop self-control is by speaking to themselves, first overtly by talking out loud, and then covertly. For example, two researchers found that, “Children talked to themselves more when they were faced with a difficult task, when working by themselves, or when a teacher was not available to help.  They studied the private speech in Appalachian children, (a region of great poverty), as well as middle-class children. They found that Appalachian children’s private speech developed at a slower pace than those who were middle-class.”

Psychoanalysis helps round out our understanding of the dynamics of self-control. Certainly one puzzle of human motivation is why people would inflict pain on themselves. The high school athlete who trains to the point of exhaustion, the high school violinist who practices for hours a day are submitting to what at times is self-imposed tedium, discomfort and disappointment.  One possible explanation is that they anticipate great rewards. But in fact, unlike the setting of the Marshmallow test, these rewards are far in the future and very uncertain. A different hypothesis is that starting out, as young strivers, they are rewarded by their teachers’ and mentors’ approval, but that later, as they mature, they internalize this approving voice. The voice becomes part of their psychological makeup, so that they can reward themselves with feelings of self-esteem and worthiness even when their objective achievements are partial or incomplete and their experience is unpleasant.  

Psychoanalysis calls this internal voice, the “ego ideal” while developmental psychologists describe it as a process of “moral internalization.” Broadly, this process describes how young people are acculturated. Consider the extreme case of a young research scientist who spends a decade on a research question encountering only one dead-end after the other. In this situation the scientist’s internalized “voice” has become abstract, represented not by a person, but by the ideals of scientific study and its meaning for human achievement. One way to understand Freud’s use of the term ‘sublimation” is to envision a developmental movement in the psyche’s structure, starting with the “teacher in the flesh,” moving through the internalized voice of a mentor, and arriving at an end point where a person subordinates himself or herself to abstract cultural ideals such as the scientific method. When parents use physical disciplining tactics excessively, they derail the moral internalization process.

Psychoanalysis proposes that this developmental movement does not proceed smoothly and without conflict. In this way of thinking, children and adults do not readily relinquish what gratifies them immediately, that is why people under conditions of stress resort frequently to drug use, drinking or sexual acting out. Freud argued that in this sense the process of civilizing the individual creates in its wake conflict and discontent. It is never complete and can create unhappiness, hence the regression. One way then to understand the harsher features of the Success Academy schools, is to posit that the school must become an agent of necessary acculturation, imposing the pain and discipline the child must suffer through, in order to gain the self esteem and sense of self-worth that achievement and approval brings.

But I can well imagine my reader recoiling from such a proposition. There is after all a very vital and powerful tradition of theorizing about schooling, “the progressive education movement,” which posits that the acculturation process can be naturalized, so that children, led only by their search for pleasure, their innate curiosity and their wish to play, can acquire all the intellectual and emotional skills they need to thrive as adults.  This idea has been expressed in innumerable pedagogical innovations, for example the “open classroom,” “whole language teaching,” “project based learning,”   “self-guided instruction,” "teaching 'critical thinking skills' (as against a substantive understanding of a discipline),"  “child-centered pedagogy,” and “constructivism.”

I know that I am at some risk of crossing swords with experts, but as far as I understand the history of these innovations, none have been successful when applied to the teaching of young children, particularly children from low-income families, except when seriously modified or implemented by charismatic teachers.  One reason that I can say this with some confidence is that the driving impulse behind these pedagogies is the faulty assumption that just as children learn to speak a language and master the social rules of the playground spontaneously, so they should be able to spontaneously learn to read write, figure, and think critically. But our modern understanding of the mind is that it is modular in construction (See, Egan: 2002). The skills for learning language or understanding a social hierarchy are specialized and innate. They do not represent a generalized ability to learn. In this sense, it is useful to see progressive pedagogy as one branch of “utopian thinking,” a schema through which adults project onto children the wish that a society could socialize its members so that individuality is never compromised and individual impulses are never suppressed.

There is remarkable piece of social history that is relevant here. From 1967 to 1995, the U.S. federal government launched and sustained, Project Follow Through, which remains still today, “ as the world’s largest education experiment.” “Over the first 10 years more than 22 sponsors, worked with over 180 (educational) sites at a cost of over $500 million in a massive effort to find ways to break the cycle of poverty through improved education.” Schools with the support of parents could adopt one of a number of educational models. The reading portion of this study involved over 15,000 students and was designed to test the effectiveness of models of reading instruction by gauging three outcomes; basic skills, cognitive growth, such as critical thinking skills, and the child’s affective experience, for example his or her self esteem. Program results were measured by tests that assessed children’s academic achievements in math and reading competence, their cognitive skills, and two tests of their affective experiences, --their self-esteem, and their readiness to attribute their successes and failures to their own efforts. Interestingly, a plurality of parent groups and schools, chose a program called, “Direct Instruction,” (see YouTube), a highly scripted teaching program that emphasizes both drill, assessment and individual attention. Abt Associates, the premier program evaluation firm of the last decades of the 20^th century, conducted the evaluation of Project Follow Through with the following results.

To the embarrassment of progressive education theorists, Direct Instruction, a scripted and teacher guided method of instruction was by far and away the most successful program on all three dimensions, the academic, the cognitive and the affective. Many of the programs in fact reduced achievement. The Harvard Educational Review published a critique of the Abt evaluation methodology and the evaluators countered with a spirited defense in the same issue of the journal.  A group of progressive education theorists persuaded the National Institute of Education, to not disseminate the results of the study in part because, “The audience for the Follow Through evaluations is an audience of teachers for whom appeals to the need for accountability of public funds, or the rationality of science are largely irrelevant.” In other words, teachers would not care.

There is another piece of this story that helps shed light on the political passions that that the Success Academy network of schools provokes. Some of my readers may recall or may have learned about a visceral and dramatic conflict that took place in New York City in 1968 between the teachers union (UFT), black parents, community leaders and the city’s board of education, over who would control the schools. The teachers, wary of local community boards who might decide to fire or remove teachers at will, went on strike, opening up a social and psychological chasm between white teachers and black parents. The conflict also exacerbated tensions between the black community and the Jewish community (many teachers were Jewish) in the city. It was by all accounts a visceral, and an emotionally draining conflict. Some political scientists argue that the historic Black-Jewish political alliance, which was fashioned and strengthened during the Civil Rights movement, never recovered.

One result of the conflict was that a group of parents at Public School 137 in the Ocean-Hills Brownsville section of New York City, -- the epicenter of the communal conflict – decided to bid for participation in Project Follow Through and then chose Direct Instruction as the model they wished to test! As two researchers write, “ The well publicized conflict between the administrators and staff at Public School 137 and the United Federation of teachers in 1966-1968 over the issue of community control irreversibly politicized the Ocean Hill Brownsville District and P.S. 137 in particular. Related activities got parents involved in schools in such a way not found in any other poverty-ridden area. Parents learned how to use power. Some used this power to have P.S. 137 chosen as one of the schools in the national Follow Through program and to select the structured Direct Instruction model. Parent support has kept the program going for 14 years, despite cuts due to the New York City budget crisis of 1975 and subsequent reductions in Federal funding.” Reporting on an evaluation of this program at the school, the researchers note that Direct Instruction was a success.

I think this bit of social history provides some insight into the raw feelings and conflicts that Success Academy has provoked. Let me speculate on what I believe to be the question that community leaders in the black community are raising.  Can the Black community in old inner cities collectively empower itself? Can it, through its own political consciousness, bring will and self control to the aid of its parents and children?  Answering this question in the affirmative may be the only route through which the black community can exercise its forcefulness, without succumbing to the kind of street violence we saw in Ferguson Missouri, after a jury acquitted a white policeman charged with murdering a young black man. This self control was also what the Nation of Islam offered Malcolm X, a reprieve from his criminal impulses, so that through rigorous religious practice and faith he could recover his many and extraordinary talents. Or if the answer is "no," will this community become the object of social programs and social experiments that others -- elites, policy specialists, urban planners, shape and lead? 

If I am right about this question, I wonder if there is not a deep yearning for recovering what was in fact the greatest exemplification of self control in a political movement -- when the Civil rights movement and its leaders taught its members to respond to beatings, murders and fire-bombings, non-violently. But the distressing issue this yearning raises, is on what grounds can community leaders who hope to build empowerment collectively by building political consciousness, possibly deprive individual children and parents of an opportunity for a better education? This is why in the YouTube video of the community meeting, the opponents of Success Academy must concede to its proponents, parents of children who attend its schools, that they do have the right to choose where their children will study. I believe that this concession undermines the opponents’ moral standing and political effectiveness.

Diane Ravitch, a scholar of education and a fierce opponent of charter schools, argues that charter schools undermine the society’s commitment to public education. The question is what vision of public education in the inner city is on offer. The reality is inescapably dispiriting. As I write from Philadelphia, the schools are segregated, students are promoted to higher grades without mastering the requisite skills—a form of psychological expulsion -- and parents do not exercise a strong voice in shaping the school’s climate. Only the black community can save itself collectively from these conditions. No one else cares enough. Absent that, charter schools are an escape valve for the many children lucky enough to attend the good ones.