How teachers can encourage Falseness

In which I tell a bewildering true story

Many years ago, when I was a doctoral student, I had a dissertation advisor who could not see me.

What I mean by this is she had no idea of or even interest in who I truly was. She labeled me based on a teensy bit of data and insisted on interacting with me as if I were the person she had decided I was.

Her label was “linguist.” “Oh, you’re a linguist,” she once told me. (Actually, she said this many times.) I remember wanting to look over my shoulder like “You talkin’ to me?” Because I was no linguist. I had studied Chinese in college, yes, and I had taken an introductory course in linguistics (and loved it), but really? Classical Chinese and one intro course do not make a “linguist.”

The experience of being so profoundly mis-seen, mis-known, by a significant teacher was incredibly bewildering for me. I felt chronically unsafe knowing that she might realize her mistake at any minute and, what? accuse me of lying to her? abandon me as a phony? I mean, many graduate students (and professors!) suffer from Imposter Syndrome, but damn! This wasn’t a syndrome. It was real! My professor had turned me into an imposter!

Although I was a dedicated student and cared a lot about what I was studying, I was panicked to discover myself under-performing in this teacher’s class. For one thing, I found her incomprehensible as an instructor. She was a famous researcher, sure. But as a teacher? Horrendous. For another thing, it felt impossible to believe I could satisfy her high expectations of me when they were based on fantasy. Why would I bother? What was she actually able to perceive about me? How could my work possibly rate? Obviously, what was true for her was false for me. How was I to navigate that bizarre existential contradiction? I could not position myself in her universe in any way that felt secure.

I remember the time I spent with her as surreal.

And then I got lockjaw.

That is, I couldn’t open my mouth without excruciating pain. I would try and my jaw would pop alarmingly and the bottom of my face would erupt in flames.

It just so happened that this problem coincided with a visit to my acupuncturist. (I went to grad school in California. ‘Nuff said.) He claimed he couldn’t help me but asked a crucial question: “Is there something you want to say or someone you want to say it to that you can’t?”

Yes. My feckin’ advisor.

Fusers SUCK

This is the hold a fuser — someone of importance who has merged with you, turning you into the person they think you are or need you to be — can have over their chosen object: You (the object) conform to their vision of you. That is, you consent to present to them the False Self they require. If you don’t, you disappear. Because, sad but true, you do not exist in a fuser’s universe if you are real. If you are yourself. You exist only as they wish you to be in their perpetually self-serving imagination.

This is a terrible, terrible trap. The choice is between being what someone falsely believes you to be or disappearing from their world, from their regard — or possibly opening yourself up to their wrathful disappointment when you thwart them by being yourself. When the fuser is a valued attachment figure, like a teacher, or an essential caregiver, like a parent, and when their object is a child or vulnerable student, this is no choice at all.

Fortunately, I was 34 years old. (Yes, it’s appalling that I put up with this advisor for as long as I did at such an advanced age!) But thank god for my wise body. For it served me up a locked jaw. And my acupuncturist helped me interpret the psychosomatic symptom: that I was unable to be the person my dissertation advisor needed me to be (someone she could see as a mini-version of her, a brilliant linguist). Contorting to her vision was literally hurting me.

So I broke up with her. And my lockjaw disappeared.

OK, what’s my point? It’s this (and it’s related to my podcast episode that just dropped): Parents (like the ones in Season 2 Episode 1) are not the only people who help to create False Selves. False Selves being the façades we construct in response to early caregivers or other attachment figures who cannot see us but respond instead to who they want to see, who they want us to be. A good boy (instead of a delinquent). A smart (or dumb) daughter (who’s actually simply human: smart in some ways and dumb in others). A great athlete (who hates sports). A young confidante (who actually needs an adult to confide in). A perfect son (who has the regular inventory of human flaws). The variations, the ways children contort to please blindly demanding or needy parents, are endless. And common.

But sometimes it is teachers who encourage falseness in their students. Like my short-lived dissertation advisor. Like Mr. Birdwhistle in Chapter Two of my book The Feeling of Teaching. (OMG, if you recognize that allusion you deserve a prize.) Teachers who for whatever reason idealize or fuse with their students — turn them into objects onto which they can project their own identities, hopes, or needs — are, to put it mildly, doing their students a disservice. As are teachers who pigeonhole students as troublemakers or low achievers. All these misreadings are unfair and unfortunate. And can lead to bad behavior (say, underperforming in class) or even debilitating physical symptoms (like lockjaw).

What teachers should do, in my humble opinion, and what parents should do, in the lofty opinion of Heinz Kohut (and other psychoanalytic theorists), is to become mirrors. People who reflect back accurately and non-judgmentally. Who describe what they see, good and bad, in terms their students can hear and make use of. Who get out of the fuckin’ way, who turn the mirror around so they’re not constantly looking at themselves and seeing the world as a reflection of them but rather can see their students (and children) clearly. And generously. Because seeing and being seen are fundamental to human development. And seeing and being seen accurately, as my story about my narcissistic dissertation advisor and, in the opposite way, as Allie’s story in Season 2 Episode 1 both attest, make healthy learning and growing possible.