“Transference, Obedience, and the Logic of Emancipation: Psychoanalytic Lessons from the ‘Third Wave’” by Antti Saari

This article analyses the dynamics of teaching political topics such as fascism and authoritarian rule, using as a case study the experiment of the “Third Wave”, a highschool experiment on authority and obedience conducted in 1967 by American school teacher Ron Jones. Concerning the questions of transference, teacher-student bonds, and forms of teaching, this article explores the effects of letting students experience authoritarian rule first hand, rather than being told about it. Transference describes a psychological process where subjects look at others for recognition in order to feel more complete, and in the case of a teacher, this can mean wanting to be deemed a good student, or wanting to identify with the teacher. Through this transference, a teacher-student bond forms where the teacher is regarded as having all the answers, and the student as needing these answers to be shown to them. However, since the teacher also is not a self-sufficient ego, the fantasy of transference cannot be fulfilled, which leads to countertransference; the desire of the teacher to get students’ admiration. As Saari argues, in the case of the Third Wave experiment, the transference was overcome by stripping the students of their object of attachment. The experiment ended by Jones brutally telling the students they had fallen for authoritarian rule, and making a direct comparison between them and Nazi Germany by showing documentary footage of Hitler during Nazi Regime. Using this method of showing rather than telling, Jones followed what Saari calls Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition. By disorienting the students from what they thought was reality, the possibility of self-assessment and reflection is opened. Saari calls this a “dark emancipation”, whereby students are stripped of their fantasies of themselves as morally pure beings. 

While Saari sees dark emancipation as a successful lesson, she finds the conduct of the third wave experiment not up to ethical standards. Directly lying to students, and indoctrinating them, does not take into consideration the student’s wellbeing. Even more so, no debriefing happened after the experiment, giving students no sense of closure. Overall, Saari argues for a more critical and ethical pedagogy when it comes to teaching questions of politics, democracy, and authority in the classroom, arguing that the enabling factors for authoritarian rule are often found in both students’ and teachers’ fantasies, desires, and anxieties. She claims that there is no perfect way to go about teaching this, but that the focus should be on how this emancipation calls for a critical assessment of the self. 

This article is especially relevant for those interested in the pedagogical dimension of perpetrator studies. It presents a critical assessment of the simulation or experiment as pedagogical strategy and raises some core issues in education on topics such as authority, complicity, and obedience/conformity.

Author of this entry: Dagmar Nan

Saari, Antti. “Transference, Obedience, and the Logic of Emancipation: Psychoanalytic Lessons from the ‘Third Wave’.” Handbook of Theory and Research in Cultural Studies and Education, 2020, pp. 179-192.