Never-Ending Adolescence

Never-Ending Adolescence A Psychoanalytic Study of Resistance Farah Virani-Murji and Lisa Farley Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Education and Resistance: A Psychoanalytic Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 On the Incredible Need to Believe and the Resistance of Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Conclusion and Future Directions: The Adolescence of Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Abstract In this chapter, we speculate about a psychic quality of resistance manifesting in a fantasy formation that we are calling “never-ending adolescence.” Also known as the Peter Pan syndrome, we argue that never-ending adolescence is made from a fantasy of not growing up that takes shape in a longing to dwell forever in “what we imagine as a time before” (Britzman, The very thought of education: psychoanalysis and the impossible professions. State University of New York Press, Albany, 2009, p. 43). We propose that the technologically driven quality of today’s adolescence amplifies this archaic fantasy structure, setting into motion the creation of nostalgic objects that have come to be known as “throwback” phenomena signifying fantasied portals into an idealized time of the childhood past. Such phenomena, we suggest, freeze time into “immobile sections” that secure a certainty of experience and resist what Julia Kristeva (Hatred and forgiveness. Columbia University Press, New York, 2013) calls the “mobility of F. Virani-Murji (*) · L. Farley York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: Farah_Virani@edu.yorku.ca; LFarley@edu.yorku.ca © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. P. Trifonas (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research in Cultural Studies and Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01426-1_34-2 1 2 F. Virani-Murji and L. Farley duration” (p. 135, original emphasis). Against a backdrop of throwback phenomena, we theorize never-ending adolescence as marked by a halting resistance of time that defends against entry into a future plugged into an avalanche of both information and uncertainty. Through our discussion, we pose a challenge to developmental constructions positing adolescence as simply a forerunner to adulthood and rather suggest how we are all adolescents when we engage idealized objects and attachments that stall the mobility of time. The challenge for both teachers and students is to imagine ways of being and becoming that can make tolerable, and even enjoyable, the imperfections and frustrations of living a life that is less filtered and fuller for it. Keywords Learning · Resistance · Ideality · Adolescence · Difficult knowledge Introduction Education and Resistance: A Psychoanalytic Discussion “Education,” Deborah Britzman (2010) reminds us, “is no stranger to resistance” (p. 240). Much of this has to do with what learning demands of the subject. Not only does education confront learners with new, unfamiliar, or difficult knowledge, it also imposes a demand for change that can register as a loss, risk, or criticism of the self. For Britzman (1998), psychoanalysis begins with precisely this view of education, one that takes as axiomatic the emotional stakes of learning. From this perspective, education is not only a progress narrative toward mastery but an uneasy encounter with “perspectives, situations, and ideas that may not just be unfamiliar but appear at first glance as a criticism of the learner’s view” (p. 11). Insofar as learning involves negotiating meaning “with what is always necessarily outside and other to the subject itself,” it also sets into motion an experience of loss that means giving up parts of the self that one has come to recognize and love (Todd 2003, p. 19). This is precisely why, as Anna Freud (1937) argued almost a century ago, we should expect students to resist education. “Step by step,” A. Freud explains, “education aims at the exact opposite of the child’s instinctive desires” (p. 58). As Sharon Todd (2003) writes, “there is something profoundly at risk in coming to know, involving renunciations and sacrifices that are sometimes too great to bear” (p. 20). Such risk is unevenly distributed and can be particularly pronounced when the knowledge on offer feels too distant from the identities of students whose experiences are disappeared from the normative aims of curriculum. No wonder education provokes resistance. All at once, it asks of students to change who they are, to consider the views of others, to think on their own, and to do so while searching for lost traces of themselves that may or may not be found in curriculum and pedagogy. Still, narratives of progress tend to override any consideration of loss, and so resistance, as part and parcel of learning. In James Stillwaggon’s (2017) words, the pain of loss “remains unspeakable in the language Never-Ending Adolescence 3 of curriculum, and in which educational transformation presents itself as a positive growth without negative residue or remainder” (p. 52). Psychoanalysis interferes with this dreamy narrative, offering instead a study of the residues and remainders that resist education as symbolic of experiences that are otherwise refused expression. Where school success too often translates into assimilation or compliance, resistance may be read as transformative, taking shape in psychical acts of protest against social norms, painful legacies, and unequal structures that flatten the diversities of human experience. Here, we can think of resistance as a psychical labor of standing up for difference amid policies and practices that aim to school students into normative ways of being in the name of happy and bright futures (Ahmed 2010). And here is where psychoanalysis might come closest to educational theories of resistance that read the student’s refusal to learn not as an individual failure needing more education but rather as an effect of living in an oppressive social world that itself requires radical change (Giroux 1984). As much as resistance shines a light on the impingements of the outside world, it can also refer to internal defense mechanisms that protect the ego from its own desires and instincts delivering “unwelcome affects” (A. Freud 1937, p. 32). Resistance is, in this context, a response to internal pressure in a bid to preserve a sense of “the self’s ideality” in the face of intense affects such as hatred, frustration, and rage, but also even pleasing feelings of tenderness, pleasure, and desire (Britzman 2010, p. 244). Resistance protects the ego from pain and keeps us from our deepest wishes and wants. “With resistance,” Britzman (2010) writes, “desire is held in suspense” (p. 244). This is a paradoxical statement, for, in common parlance, getting what one wants should present no conflict, and certainly not pain. But, as Adam Phillips (2010) reminds us, “people can be frightened of pleasure” and often “hide from themselves what their real pleasures are” (p. 86). The reasons for this have to do with the ways that pleasure marks the most vulnerable place of who we are; what we want stands as a reminder of how much we have to lose. The brightest future imaginable is tinged with the melancholic anticipation of its loss. Not only does admitting desire carry this risk of loss, it can be met with disapproval, or be felt, from the inside, as conflictive. We can and often have “competing pleasures” emerging at a crossroads between desire for the self and the desires of others (Phillips 2010, p. 86). Amid conflict, it can be tempting to “sacrifice my genuine interests for the love and approval” of others (p. 86). At the level of the unconscious, then, desire is troubling, for it exposes the fault lines of human vulnerability: anxieties of loss, wishes for love and to be loved, and fears of punishment for wanting something forbidden. Early in his work, Sigmund Freud changed his mind about the meaning of resistance that marked its own “revolutionary change” (Lear 2005, p. 134). No longer a stubborn obstacle to the unconscious, Freud began to read resistance as testimony in disguise: what he called a “compromise formation” signaling conflicting forces emerging from the very thing to which it seemed opposed. Phillips (1994) makes precisely this point when he describes “resistances” as “peculiarly inventive artifacts” annexed by past pleasures and pains that they also fend off (p. 86). Resistance is therefore a contradictory structure and itself a representation of conflict, the tip of the iceberg into underwater dissent. As Britzman (2010) argues, 4 F. Virani-Murji and L. Farley resistance can feel like “a fight between affect and idea, where one both knows and does not know, and where one wishes to disturb the universe but prefers not to” (p. 247). When affect and idea are in conflict, “as they are in a time of resistance,” Britzman (1998) explains that “the self struggles for elusive mastery,” setting into motion a host of resistances (p. 119). Reversal, repetition, idealization, denial, and even altruism usher in a feeling of control and defend against uncertainty and loss. For instance, A. Freud (1937) notes that resistance can function as a “reaction formation” that makes painful feelings more tolerable (p. 39). Through reversal, she writes, “a child may exhibit indifference when we should have looked for disappointment, exuberant high spirits instead of mortification, excessive tenderness instead of jealousy” (p. 39). Britzman (1998), too, notes that the tendency to repeat familiar actions can resist the painful labor of memory. It can feel easier to “fixate in repetition and nostalgia for the lost object” rather than represent loss in the work of remembering the emptiness left behind (Britzman 1998, p. 103). In each case, resistance can be read as an unconscious communication that covers its own tracks; that is, indifference represents and conceals disappointment, high spirits hint at and hide mortification, intense love conveys and denies jealousy, and nostalgia unveils and refuses grief. This is why Britzman suggests, with Freud, that teachers respond to resistance not simply with more demands for attention or knowledge. To do so is only to intensify the conflict. If all goes well, teachers may rather read resistance as a “precondition” (p. 118), provided that “resistance to learning” can be “made into a curiosity to learn from resistance” (p. 134). The question is whether we can be curious about the affects that resistances fend off. Both frustrating and creative, charged with affect and the idea it refuses, resistance requires patience in working through the significance of these tensions. The work of psychoanalysis, and the work of this chapter, is to surface unwelcome affects held in psychic forms of resistance and to give words to the ideas they represent. With A. Freud (1937), we seek to trace resistances to their “historical source,” with a view to “recover their mobility” in language, where they can be integrated, contemplated for their effects, shared with others, and ever remade (p. 33). After all, “[w]hat saves us from useless haphazardness and from the implosive repetition of long ago events that seem to resist language,” writes Britzman (2010), “is that we can put these feelings into words” (p. 241, emphasis added). The gamble is that words also confront us with the “emotional pain” that resistance fends off (Britzman 2010, p. 242). In what follows, we give language to feelings held in a particular form of resistance manifesting as a fantasy of stopping time that protects the ego from the uncertainties of entering into the world as a historical subject. Drawing from Kristeva (2009), we examine the adolescent “need to believe” (p. 13) in an idealized object that resists the human fact of failure wrought by living in time or the “mobility of duration” (2010, p. 135). Through our analysis of a range of “throwback” phenomena taking hold in a highly digitized era of contemporary adolescence, we underscore the importance of narratives that can be curious about the ordinary failures that resistance fends off, that support processes of working through the emotional pain of becoming that is our human condition, and, if all goes well, that bring into relief the impossible search for a perfectly filtered one. Never-Ending Adolescence 5 On the Incredible Need to Believe and the Resistance of Time Kristeva (2009) offers a discussion of perpetual adolescence in her treatise on the figure of the adolescent “believer” (p. 14). In this figure, she unearths the feverish qualities of the mind’s search for the “Ideal Object” in a bid to defend against the losses underwriting the experience of being and becoming (p. 14, original emphasis). The adolescent believer, Kristeva argues, presents as a passionate quest for certitude that she describes as “a malady of ideality” (p. 16). This figure stands in juxtaposition with Freud’s Oedipal child, who, in Kristeva’s (2009) words, “is a subject of epistemophilic curiosity” and a “seeker of knowledge” driven by curiosity about the meaning, and origins, of existence (p. 14, original emphasis). While the Oedipal child meets the stumbling block of parental love that prohibits desire, the adolescent believer is driven by a quest for absolute satisfaction that resists the ambivalence of love, the limits of desire, and the destabilizing effect of questions. Thinking with Kristeva, Britzman (2012) echoes this position: “adolescence trades the ambivalence and questions of childhood sexual research for the absolutisms of knowledge” (p. 279). Kristeva (2009) describes the distinction thusly: “The adolescent is not a lab scientist; he’s a believer” (p. 14, original emphasis). The sheer force of ideality stiffens the elastic qualities of inner life. It splits the world into extremes of good and bad that resist the messy complexities that constitute being and becoming. In this sense, the adolescent need to believe may be thought of as a form of resistance that fends off the ordinary losses, limits, and failures of life. It has, in Kristeva’s (2009) view, a stabilizing effect on the mind that may be thought of as a defense against psychic tumult. While self-protective, Kristeva (2009) adds a cautionary note: Ideality is “[a]n extremely dangerous stabilization” that is “fatal. . . for the subject” (p. 17, original emphasis). The reason for this has to do with the way ideality gives way to “a fall into suffering when ideality is disillusioned or fails to stabilize the subject” (Britzman 2012, p. 279). The problem is that we can suffer deeply by ideals that fail to materialize, even while their impossibility fuels a never-ending quest. Strangely, the impossible quality of ideals casts a long shadow confirming the belief in their existence. As Kristeva (2009) writes, “the shadow of the ideal has fallen over adolescent drive and crystallized in the need to believe” (p. 19, original emphasis). At stake here is a brittle psychical position built on a superhuman image of perfection that fossilizes around the rigid structure of the superego, where extremes of pleasure and punishment are animated and blurred. Ideals may inspire, but they also hurt. The adolescent malady of ideality may be read as an addendum to Kristeva’s (1995) earlier work in the New Maladies of the Soul, where she speculates about a malaise born of a modern age of political crisis and mass-mediated culture in the Western world. As Kristeva (1995) writes of this era: “[T]oday’s men and women– who are stress-ridden and eager to achieve, to spend money, have fun, and die– dispense with the representation of their experience of what we call psychic life” (p. 7). Cast in the language of the adolescent believer, the aforementioned purchase of achievement might be read as a malady of ideality, where possessions fend off the uncertainties of modern life. For us, Kristeva’s adolescent believer represents a related malady of the soul spurred on in a highly digital world that takes “refuge 6 F. Virani-Murji and L. Farley in the image,” where filters protect against the imperfections of humanity (1995, p. 9). We further suggest it is possible to link Kristeva’s adolescent malady of ideality with her later discussion on the resistance of time. For Kristeva (2013), the resistance of time marks a plunge into “false time” or “ignored time” that defends against the temporality of living in history or “duration” (p. 134, original emphasis). This temporal stoppage is rooted in a fantasy of the object as “unchanging” and eternally true (Britzman 2012, p. 279). However, to experience psychical life is to experience objects, including ideals, as changed by the passage of time: what Kristeva (2013) calls the “mobility of duration” (p. 135, original emphasis). In the pursuit of a totally satisfying and unchanging ideal, the adolescent need to believe resists the endurance of time, compounded by a digital world in which information arrives in no time at all. In what follows, we bring these qualities of never-ending adolescence to bear on a handful of digital attachments and recurring motifs associated with a contemporary generation of young people. Known as millennials, this generation has not experienced a time before the World Wide Web of the Internet. We speculate about what is psychically going on and at stake in each example, with a focus on how the fantasy structure of never-ending adolescence takes shape in, and can be amplified by, the digital world. The hope is to render the metaphor of never-ending adolescence in ways that are intentionally playful. We present each example as a snapshot, or symptom, that has at its foundation the psychical position of never-ending adolescence. To conclude, we underscore the possibility of another sort of engagement that symbolizes or “puts into words” the anxieties that adolescent ideality fends off. What does it mean, we ask, to be curious about the conflicts fossilized in the stalled time of never-ending adolescence? What kind of education can support the painful labor of facing the losses of living a life? Can the teacher be curious about her own adolescent filters of an ideal education? #tbt and Never Letting Go While all forms of separation invoke a fear of loss, we suggest that the highly digitized world of our contemporary moment provides great traction for the adolescent fantasy of ideality, with its vice grip on lost objects. Scrolling through the images gathered under the hashtag throwback thursday (#tbt or #throwbackthursday), one gets a sense of the spellbinding quality of adolescent ideality. The hashtag has received attention from bloggers and popular culture websites, where articles can be found outlining the guidelines and rules of the hashtag, including how to harness the action of calling back memories for advertising and marketing. First used in 2006 by the blogger Matt Halfhill, the hashtag gained momentum in 2011 on Instagram and, by 2013, became one of the most popular topics on the platform (Gannes 2014). To date, the use of the hashtag exceeds 450 million on Instagram. The hashtag is commonly used while posting photographs of one’s childhood or reminiscing of a time that is imagined to be easier or more pleasant than the current moment. In relation to this last claim, Leahey (2014) asserts that engaging with the hashtag #tbt on social media allows participants to call back the past to the present, as they share in an “universal longing” (para. 4). Immersing oneself in nostalgia promises to alleviate feelings of loneliness and Never-Ending Adolescence 7 strengthen belongingness in a community. Zhou et al. (2008) suggest that “the past, when appropriately harnessed, can strengthen psychological resistance to the vicissitudes of life” (p. 1028). Nostalgia functions as “psychological resource” that protects the ego “in situations of self-threat and social threat” (Zhou et al. 2008, p. 1028). Returning to Britzman, “nostalgia for the lost object” allows the ego to hold open a continuous engagement that resists the unwelcome affects accompanying the loss. Cast in the language of ideality, this proclivity to relive childhood through “throwback” phenomena” can be read as defending against lost attachments that necessarily accompany the painful labor of growing up. After all, in growing up, the ego gives up earlier states of being in the work of forging increasingly expansive attachments in a complex social world. Thinking with Kristeva (2013), longing for the childhood past immobilizes time and resists the experience that she calls the “mobility of duration” (p. 135, original emphasis). In “throwing back” to childhood, the pain of loss is stalled in an eternal present, resisting entry into and endurance of the psychical frustrations and failures of entering into the world a historical subject. #childhood memories and the Collection of Artifacts From the revival of old television shows such as Gilmore Girls, Full(er) House, and Will and Grace to the reintroduction of Nintendo® and Super Nintendo® gaming systems, the millennial generation can be read as one that delights in the capacity to collect and repeat the ideality of childhood idols. Nostalgia for this generation is not only about fond memories and photographs; millennials relive the past by revisiting their childhoods through television shows, games, and attending concerts. Nintendo ® Classic and Super Nintendo® Classic game consoles have consistently sold out within hours of their release, with lineups awaiting new stock (Rubin 2017). Even popular cereals from the millennial cohort’s teenager lives have made a comeback; General Mills reintroduced French Toast Crunch cereal after a Facebook group started a petition requesting that the cereal be back on the market (Pix11 News 2014). French Toast Crunch was only sold in the USA for 10 years in the market from 1996 to 2006, the millennial adolescent period. While seemingly trivial, this phenomenon of gathering, sorting, and archiving childhood objects conveys its own emotional stakes. Through collections, archival mastery provides containment for runaway affects, setting a stage for old conflicts to repeat in disguised form. Freud (1914/2006) states that when an individual is experiencing repression, instead of remembering and recounting a childhood exploration, “he reproduces it not as a memory, but as an action; he repeats it, without of course being aware of the fact that he is repeating it” (p. 394, original emphasis). As a form of repetition, the effort to relive one’s childhood through attachments to ideal objects suggests an unresolved or unacknowledged anxiety within the self. According to Freud, we often repeat our old patterns and behaviors from a time before as a way to resist acknowledgment of the past. There is a fear, or avoidance, of a part of the self that leaves us unable to “grasp the real intention of his obsessional impulse” (Freud 1914/2006, p. 396). This tendency to repeat can also be examined as a problem transference (Freud 1940/ 2003): a quality of relation characterized by the return of the repressed, binding a person to repeat old patterns in new relationships. In the analytic dyad, for instance, 8 F. Virani-Murji and L. Farley Freud (1937) noted the tendency of patients to transfer displaced affects onto the situation of the analysis, such that split off feelings became directed against the analyst. We may all recognize the transference at work in education when students and teachers bestow each other with accompanying dynamics of love and hate that are not “newly created” in the pedagogical relationship and that have “their source” in the earliest of object relationships (A. Freud 1937, p. 18). Digital collections and nostalgic attachments facilitate this compulsion to repeat, too, in ways that ward off the hard task of mourning that also means becoming someone new in a world of others. The act of collecting and constantly revisiting, replaying, and repeating the past are symptoms of many young adults’ anxious interactions with the world. This tendency to pursue childhood as an idealized object echoes Kristeva’s (2009) incredible need to believe that, in the end, resists a meaningful engagement with the present. Thus, as educators, we must ask ourselves, what is being repressed or feared and how can we better support youth to encounter and make sense of the uncertainties of the world? The challenge of education, here, may be one of helping students represent a relationship to all that is difficult in entering into the social world and thus to transform repetitions into a meaningful historical narrative that can be engaged, remembered, and shared with others. Where the incredible need to believe has its future-oriented eye on the prize, and while education itself suffers from this malady, Kristeva allows us to propose a notion of learning that can risk looking backward, without getting stalled there. Here, education can be conceived through the transference, where repetition can meet the difference of the teacher, the curriculum, and others and where learning is a creative work of making a new relationship to old objects. Where repetition was, there memory, and meaningful history, can become. #adulting and the Art of Not Growing Up Adulthood is, like adolescence, a complex psychical position that involves not outgrowing but growing into earlier states of mind (Waddell 2000). In adulthood, the ego learns to “integrate” infantile and adolescent parts of the self “without excessive disruption of the psychic equilibrium” (Waddell 2000, p. 197). A mature or adult state of mind takes responsibility for stray parts of mind, as opposed to projecting them outside and elsewhere. The adolescent approaching adulthood faces the lonely work of maturity: marked by the capacity to work through the failure of ideals, to integrate the contradictory qualities of the mind, to acknowledge limits, and to become one’s own person in a world of others. Margot Waddell (2000) notes, too, that “one of the main undertakings of adolescence is that of establishing a mind of one’s own” (p. 177), made from a process of synthesizing emotional extremes. This task requires, in Waddell’s (2000) words, “relinquishing the denigrated and idealized versions of the self” to embody the ambivalent middle ground (p. 178). Never-ending adolescence, by contrast, signifies a form of resistance to these tensions. For example, a number of young adults belonging to what has become known as the millennial generation have adopted the term “adulting,” such that “adult” is utilized as a verb. Here, the idea of adulthood is no longer an identity one becomes but is rather a temporary state or action that one may choose to engage and Never-Ending Adolescence 9 just as easily disengage at will. In relation to this last claim, Johnson (2017) finds that millennial participants only loosely associate adulthood with the achievement of independence (p. 92). Rather, every participant agreed that being an adult is more about feeling like an adult – or adulting. Here, adulthood is transformed from a chronological inevitability to a decision one makes and un-makes to preserve the adolescent belief in the absolute: a never-ending ideality of existence. Returning to Kristeva (2009), the steadfast belief in the absolute takes shape in the idea that one can control the future – and even avoid it – through the conscious faculty of choice. Here, it is not adulthood that is idealized; in fact, it may be feared or even a source of dread. Rather, what is idealized is the ego’s belief in its capacity to stretch the time of adolescence indefinitely. However, while it may be tempting to cast this adolescent resistance of time in a negative light, such that they ought to “grow up,” we rather draw from the insights of scholars of childhood studies and queer theory to suggest something creative – and critical – in the adolescent disruption of time. Beyond the language of resistance, the adolescent embodiment of “adulting” transforms the very meaning of developmental temporality to account for the sideways distractions, diversions, and detours more often repressed in the normative ideal of reproductive futurity that presumes a heterosexual, cisgender subject (Stockton 2009). Adulting itself implies a privileged subject – both in terms of class and race – for whom this is a viable option. Not only are a vast majority of adolescents around the globe already at work to provide financial support for themselves and their families, racialized adolescents are routinely pushed into the category of “adult” – what Ann Arnett Ferguson (2000) calls “adultified” – by police, teachers, and adult professionals to justify harsh punishments and outright exclusions. Adulting therefore marks both an adolescent ideal of stalling time and an idealized subject of adolescence who is granted access to this fantasy in the first place. At issue is the way adulting exposes – and might even maintain – hierarchies of privilege and vulnerability among adolescents themselves. #filters and False Selves Online media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter enable youth to band together and express desires, hopes, wishes, and anxieties on a shared platform. These same platforms also allow users to choose from a variety of filters, some of which change the physical features of the face into a wide-eyed, infantilized image. Even the hashtag #nofilter, which boasts an ability to put “real life” on display, is carried on the fantasy of an idealized life attained without the need of digital filters. The digital world of social media calls users to its interactive and attention-seeking social exchange; posts and photos receiving “likes” give the feeling of being noticed, appreciated, and highly regarded, by peers. Indeed, being liked on social media can be more important to people than being liked in reality (Weiss 2015), leading to sometimes risky choices just to get the right photographic background, angle, or pose. But the anticipation of digital “likes” is not the same as embodying who you are. Rather, this type of validation-seeking environment may cultivate what D.W. Winnicott (1960) calls a false self: a defense organization that mediates engagements with the social world with self-presentations that protect the true self. Dovetailing 10 F. Virani-Murji and L. Farley with Kristeva’s adolescent ideality, the Winnicottian false self may present as constantly smiling, resilient, or supremely capable, even while its shell of compliance hides the true self not only from public display but also from itself. Digital filters falsify the emotional risk of embodying desire; they exchange the possibility of living in a way that is true to the self with the ideality of never-ending adolescence that makes “likes” from the threat of loss. Conclusion and Future Directions: The Adolescence of Teaching While the digital world of contemporary adolescence provides the backdrop for our discussion in this chapter, Kristeva’s (1995) malady of ideality does not begin there. The adolescent need to believe in an ideal object may have always existed in education. And it might not only belong to the adolescent but also the teacher. Significant to the psychoanalytic orientation of our chapter, the adolescent believer implicates us all. It does not refer to an actual teenager we leave behind for the more reasonable position of adulthood, although we might all recognize some of its qualities in the adolescents we may know, teach, and/or once were. Indeed, we caution against the proclivity to pathologize any individual adolescent or generation of adolescents as if they, and not the social world they inherit, are in need of challenge and change. The adolescent figure in Kristeva’s work, and in our use of it, is rather a metaphor symbolizing a psychical position impacted by historical contexts and relationships that emerges and recedes over the course of a lifetime. Psychoanalytically, the mind is not an isolated island, but an archeological site where layers of earlier times constitute the foundations of the overall structure. In other words, there exist actual adolescents and adult adolescents “when we are passionate about the absolute” (Kristeva 2009, p. 14). Such a metaphorical position may be hard to accept, particularly in a contemporary context of education that idealizes the rush to learning outcomes. In such a context, teachers facing the pressures of the job may “need to believe that only the adolescent has psychology,” which they are charged to instruct, control, and develop (Britzman 2012, p. 273). Britzman (2012) unearths these layers in her teacher education classroom, where the return of adolescent ideality is projected onto the “ideal object” of professional knowledge and into the role of the teacher (p. 274). “In learning to become the high school teacher they want to be,” Britzman (2012) explains, “they trade the uncertainty of meeting the adolescent and thoughts about their own development for an idealization of the role of the teacher” (p. 274). We are all adolescents when we yearn for time-halting certainties that secure a position of mastery. With Britzman and Kristeva, the view of adolescence presented in this chapter represents a psychical position, or archaic layer, inside us all. We further question, with Kristeva (1995), whether adolescent ideality represents a “new malady” in the fast pace of a digital world or whether its hot pursuit is “common to all times” (p. 9). We are inclined to think the latter. While the malady of ideality takes shape in the figure of the adolescent, gaining momentum in the digitally driven force of the contemporary moment, it spans a range of contexts across time and history. In the context of education, for instance, ideality can take shape in the fantasy of the perfect Never-Ending Adolescence 11 teacher or student, in pedagogical performances of mastery, and in the idealization of the teacher’s knowledge (Kristeva 1995, p. 9). However, as we have been suggesting throughout this chapter, we suffer by the very ideals for which we also strive in the name of trying to be better, or smarter, or more efficient and in charge. Ideals impoverish life, ironically, because they defend against the work of symbolizing – and so confronting – all that is lacking about existence. Across a range of symptoms, whether digital nostalgia or the fantasy of the perfect teacher, the “common denominator” of ideality thwarts the capacity for symbolization, needed, in Kristeva’s (1995) view, “to live life to its fullest” (p. 9). The idea of a full life is not, however, a perfect life. It is rather one that can symbolize all that is lacking about entering the world a historical subject: what Kristeva (2013) names above the “mobility of duration” (p. 135, original emphasis). Whereas ideality immobilizes meaning in a fantasied time without time, symbolization animates psychical experience in the realm of representation, where the conflicts that dwell there can become part of a meaningful and moving narrative of history. Symbolization is not, then, simply a matter of naming one’s emotions; it is rather the creative wellspring of existence as such. The symbolic labor of putting feelings into words, citing Kristeva (1995), “restore[s] psychic life” (p. 9). In the context of an idealized education, it can be tempting to think of the teacher’s job as one of interrupting student resistances, whether through inspirational pedagogies or corrective measures. However, this very notion idealizes the teacher’s influence, pathologizes the adolescent, and resists the difficult knowledge of education’s own limits. One challenge, we suggest, is to imagine education as a place of putting into words the psychical position of adolescence at the core of feverish pursuits that defend against conflict as the ground of both teaching and learning. A related challenge is how to attend to the complexities of psychical experience without losing sight of the social world in which the mind marshals idealization as a defense. Still, the psychoanalytic question is how to symbolize the ordinary imperfections, failures, and accidents of existence that filtered lenses of perfection fend off. Psychoanalysis acknowledges a fuller sense of humanity precisely because it is at the same time lacking. Borrowing from Britzman’s (2006; 2012) terms “the childhood of teaching” (p. 108) and “the adolescent teacher” (p. 272), we offer the adolescence of teaching as a metaphor that invites us to analyze the contexts and circumstances in which the teacher may seek out ideals, to notice the worries that pulsate on the other side of this illusion, and to admit lack as the humble condition of education and, indeed, humanity. It should also help us to identify and challenge how lack is differently and unevenly experienced by particular social identities over others. The adolescence of teaching offers a language with which we may identify and challenge narratives of education that idealize the individual – often a heroic teacher sent to rescue her students – and instead shine a light on the conditions and relationships that bolster the inner world and at times break it down. If all goes well, the adolescence of teaching may be an emotional resource that supports the creative work of looking beneath the scenery of resistance to confront what is difficult about trying to learn and to live with others and to imagine the conditions that can make tolerable, and even preferable, living a less filtered life to the fullest. 12 F. Virani-Murji and L. Farley Cross-References ▶ Cracking the Screen: Acts and Actors of Resistance in Mobile and Social Media Learning Spaces ▶ Transference, Desire, and the Logic of Emancipation: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Transformative Learning References Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. Albany: State University of New York Press. Britzman, D. P. (2006). Novel education: Psychoanalytic studies of learning and not learning. New York: Peter Lang. Britzman, D. P. (2010). Some psychoanalytic observations on quiet, ordinary and painful resistance. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 13(3), 239–248. Britzman, D. P. (2012). The adolescent teacher: A psychoanalytic note on regression in the professions. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 11(3), 272–283. Ferguson, A. A. (2000). Bad Boys: Public schools in the making of Black masculinity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Freud, S. (1914/2006). Remembering, repeating, and working through. In A. Phillips (Ed.), Penguin Freud Reader (pp. 391-413). London: Penguin. Freud, A. (1937). The ego and the mechanisms of defense. New York: International Universities Press. Freud, S. (1940/2003). An outline of psychoanalysis (H. Ragg-Kirkby, Trans.). London: Penguin. Gannes, L. (2014, May 1). Throwing back to the origins of throwback Thursday. Retrieved from: https://www.recode.net/2014/5/1/11626346/throwing-back-to-the-origins-of-throwback-thursday Giroux, H. (1984). Marxism and schooling: The limits of radical discourse. Educational Theory, 34 (2), 113–135. Johnson, A. (2017). Adulting is hard: Anxiety and insecurity in the millennial generation’s coming of age process. Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive: Honors Thesis Collection, #444. Kristeva, J. (1995). New maladies of the soul. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (2009). This incredible need to believe. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (2013). The sobbing girl: Or, on hysterical time. In J. Herman (Trans.), Hatred and forgiveness (pp. 129-152). New York: Columbia University Press. Leahey, C. (2014, May 1). Throwback Thursday: The psychology behind its success. Retrieved from: http://fortune.com/2014/05/01/throwback-thursday-the-psychology-behind-its-success/ Lear, J. (2005). Freud: An introduction. New York: Routledge. Phillips, A. (1994). On kissing, tickling, and being bored: Psychoanalytic essays on the unexamined life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Phillips, A. (2010). On balance. London: Penguin Books. Pix11 News. (2014, December 8). This discontinued ‘90s cereal is coming back. Retrieved from: https://pix11.com/2014/12/08/this-discontinued-90s-cereal-is-coming-back/ Rubin, R. (2017, November 27). As SNES Classic mini sells out, rivals step in. Retrieved from: https://www.zdnet.com/article/as-snes-classic-mini-sells-out-rivals-step-in/ Stillwaggon, J. (2017). “A fantasy of untouchable fullness”: Melancholia and resistance to educational transformation. Educational Theory, 67, 51–66. Stockton, K. B. (2009). The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Durham: Duke University Press. Never-Ending Adolescence 13 Todd, S. (2003). Learning from the other: Levinas, psychoanalysis and ethical possibilities in education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Waddell, M. (2000). Inside lives: Psychoanalysis and the growth of the personality. New York: Routledge. Weiss, G. (2015, March 13). How wanting ‘likes’ on social media is killing our capacity for actual joy. Retrieved from: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/243924 Winnicott, D. W. (1960/1987). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In: The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. Madison: International Universities Press. Zhou, X., Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., & Gao, D. (2008). Counteracting loneliness. Association for Psychological Science, 19(10), 1023–1029.