on erototransferephilia

Music: The Greencards: Weather and Water Although Beth Geisel's recent firing from her post as a teacher at a private, Christian high school in Albany New York was for sexual impropriety, her sleeping with at least four 17 year old teens was not a crime--at least until investigators discover that she had relations with someone younger (in New York the age of consent is 17). For me this much publicized and deliciously teenage story raises a couple of issues: (1) why have we seen a notable increase in teacher/student sex scandals in the past decade?; and (2) why does Geisel's (or that of Debbie Lefave) case make the news when there are hundreds cases that only get covered in their local papers? The answers to these questions are many, but I think a large number are related under the aegis of "the transference," a psychoanalytic concept that refers to the unconscious projection of wishes, desires, and feelings onto a socially inappropriate individual (almost always someone in a position of authority).

The transference was initially discovered by Freud and his colleague Breuer during their clinical researches on the phenomenon of hysteria. When they discovered patients reacting to them as parental figures—and sometimes lovers—they decided transference was a bad thing. Later, when Breuer left psychoanalysis because of a particularly lusty patient (after her advances he picked up shop, took his wife on a second honeymoon, and became a critic of Freud's understanding of an erotic unconscious), Freud eventually determined that the transference was an unavoidable dynamic in treatment, and that working with or through it was necessary and even helpful. The classic understanding of the phenomenon rooted in Freud is the projection of feelings of love, or hatred, or admiration or what have you onto the analyst. Depending on the school of thought, this projection can be of an idealized, inner-type (Jungian) or the reproduction of a past relationship with a parent (e.g., the father or mother in the British School), or the projection of present-day wishes and desires. Today, the transference is understood as fundamental to all relationships, most especially erotic/love relationships.

Consider, for example falling in love with someone in that "big way" most of us have experienced at least in our teenage years: s/he seems perfect, like s/he completes you, the proverbial "soul mate!" The theory of transference would suggest that you are projecting an idealized persona onto your lover which will eventually melt away to reveal an actual person, farts, warts, and all, which inevitably leads to conflict. Half of unions end in separation because couples are not able to let go of their projections; they are unwilling, in other words, to work through the initial stages of the transference into more "mature" and pragmatic understandings. Nevertheless, in the therapeutic setting the initial transferential feelings must be "worked through" so that the therapist literally fades into the background as a tool for the analysand to use for herself. It should not also go without saying that the therapist feels the transference too, only it is typically understood as "the countertransference," which refers to the therapists unconscious acceptance of the patient's projections—perhaps even encouraging them.

When we turn, then, to the student/teacher sex scandals of recent years, it is not difficult to explain why it happens and, in fact, why in our culture it is even overdetermined. Student/teacher sexual encounter is overdetermined for a number of reasons, but the most significant is the projection of unconscious phantasy onto the other which is at the center of teaching. Indeed, the practice of teaching is fundamentally transferential: although the challenge of new material can stimulate learning on a model of competition, most models of pedagogy function by getting the student to care about how the teacher feels about them. Students learn when they believe the teacher cares about them; teachers often deliberately chide or compliment students to foster these feelings. Larry Rickles calls this "stylin' the transference" in the college classroom.

In earlier years, the teacher's countertransferential power centers on the figure of the parent; as students mature—and especially as they reach puberty—the teacher transforms from parent to potential lover (of course, in Freudian terms these are always two sides of the same coin). I can remember fantasizing about teachers when I was in grade school (so can David Lee Roth, who's lyrics for "Hot For Teacher" was a number one hit right before I graduated from junior high). Indeed, we can even postulate that having sex with one's teacher is one of the oldest fantasies of Western civilization: in Plato's Phaedrus Socrates explains to a young teen hottie how learning from him is fundamentally a process of sublimated erotic desire. Teaching has always been stylin' the transference; same as it ever was. Peruse any porn shop and you'll see "school" is one of the most popular themes; just about any scenario you can imagine has eroticized the transference.

Of course, that the fantasy forms the sexual core of our collective being has something to do with the fact that most of the readers of this blog, and a mighty percentage of the U.S. populace, have felt the transference in the classroom with at least one teacher. So when we turn to the question, "why the increase of teacher student scandals in recent years?" one must answer that, well, there hasn’t' really been an increase at all. ). According to the Department of Education, at least ten percent of students have experienced what they term "sexual abuse" (which includes everything from consensual sex to leering), and any cursory perusal of the World Wide Web reveals countless local stories of teacher-student naughtiness (check out this growing list). There is no "profile" for these teachers or students either—although the ones we hear about in national media tend to focus on young men and skinny blonde women, especially if these blonde women like motorcycles, like Pamela Rogers (who was arrested last February for sleeping with a 13 year old). What we have been seeing, however, is a recent increase of publicity.

According to the controversial book, Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine, prosecuting student/teacher sexual indiscretions may be much more traumatic than simply letting it be. Those who prosecute "statutory rape" argue that the event is traumatic and causes psychological problems later in life, while Levine argues that study after study does not support such claims, most especially for young men. What both sides seem to leave out of this debate is the role of the transference, and how the intimacy of pedagogy and the erotics of authority provide the foundation of indiscretions (I'm not talking about abuse here; I'm talking about consensual indiscretions which I cannot put an age to since every person matures—physically and psychologically--differently).

Indeed, what both sides of the debate on "informed consent" seem to leave out is the centrality of erotic projection to the classroom. This omission is, in part, a legacy of patriarchical control (as bell hooks has written about often). It is also part of a centuries-old ideology of childhood desexualization, which underwrote the Victorian conceit that codemned Freud as a pervert for suggesting infants had sexual desires. Folks simply don't want to admit that when there are people sharing space, erotics is involved. This intensifies when one or more of the people are authorities in some way, of course.

What these debates also seem to ignore is the increasing prominence of media stories about student-teacher transferential love, which should indicate a cultural trend in media coverage (and by extension, the popular imaginary) that intensifies the transgressive appeal of fantasy. Perhaps we can trace it back in recent memory to the Mary Kay Letourneau case, who recently married the man (then decidely a "boy") she slept with over a decade ago. Since that widely publicized case to the present, almost every story featured a very attractive white woman, which, of course, is not coincidental. In answer to the second question, why do the Geisel or Debra Lefave cases break nationally instead of Elisa Kawasaki's (or perhaps more commonly, male teachers and female students)? I think the answer is gleamed by analyzing the common features of the recent increase in teacher/student sex publicity in general: the most common ideal of "American" beauty--the busty blonde bombshell--seems to be central to most of the scenarios we hear about and read about (Marilyn Monroe/Pam Anderson is in the classroom, people! It's straigt out of Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" music video; this shit was scripted in the 70s, at least!). The resurgence of this fantasy in the new "epidemic" frame surly reflects, in a homeostatic manner, the turn to cultural conservatism on the one hand, and the arrival of low-cost, "reality television and web cam" aesthetics on the other. Regarding the former, we need only think about the fantasies of yesteryear: recall in the late 1980s it was the patriarcal fantasy of Satanists sacrificing toddlers and taking their nude photos. This newer, "Hot for Teacher" epidemic rhetoric is merely the flipside (still a male fantasy, only the roles are flipped; no longer are women damsels in distress, but Mrs. Robinson-style dominatrixes ready to "teach" them teens what a clitoris really is).

But the content of the fantasy is different given our particular historical context of surveillnce. As Jodi Dean argues in her somewhat persuasive book, Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy, ours is a postmodern age in which the dominant ideology, PUBLICITY, generates a profound interest in secrecy (everyone wants to know everything about every public person, but is rabidly obsessed with his or her own privacy, a staple of conservatism). In a sense, the contemporary explosion of teacher/student sex scandals reads like a delightfully perverse Lynch film: what the "news media" package for us are only the scandals which involve pretty women bedding more than willing teens in the neatly manicured suburban neighborhoods of A Town Like Yours. We watch the stories unfold like a film, just like those who participate in them experience their lives just like a film (and on the latter tip, note Debbie Lefave is pleading "insanity!"). Teacher student sex scandals comprise our contemporary transferential pornography, and unlike the priestly pedophilia of yesteryear, this time the fantasies will last a little bit longer. What bisexual or straight men (and more than a few women of any identification) among us, identifying with our teenage selves, would not like to have sex Debbie Lefave? Whom among us did not secretly fantasize the hot teacher molesting us after school during detention? (Jeeze, I can remember seeing a care-giver's bare breasts as she was wiping down tables in pre-school and wanting to un-wean myself!) All we are seeing today is a longstanding fantasy finally coming to the screen again—the return of the repressed. The sheer volume and force of its recent re-arrival, however, bespeak a stifling conservatism, the kind of system of beliefs that says sublimated desire is better witnessed as violence abroad than letting your kids watch two adults making out on TV.