Pedagogical Dilemmas.

According to a famous evolutionary biologist, it is difficult to write popular science articles. Only a person who thoroughly masters his subject, who masters it completely, understands  what it is in a scientific work that can captivate outsiders. Furthermore, it requires an artistic frame of mind, from the scientific workshops, to promote what is possible to verbalize, and do it in the right living shape. Not to speak about what hell it must be pedagogical to promote that, which one cannot verbalize. Most attempts in that direction are liable to fail.

The foundation for security and lust for life grow out of a loving birth and childhood as well as through a stimulating pedagogical schooling. We know a lot of what happens if there are major shortcomings in our life before, during and just after birth. When I think about my schooldays, which I had hoped would be a stay in a pedagogic greenhouse, I wonder if I got a single impulse for the better, for anything good, intellectually, emotionally, aesthetically, or whatever they called it? No, possibly moral influence. Did I ever get a thrill out of what I call enthusiasm? Unfortunately, I have to answer NO. The same negative answer I got from almost everyone, I asked about their experience.

Nonetheless, I have an indelible memory of a pedagogic teacher. One day, I was 14, we got on the train to the town where I went to school. I sat smoking, being strictly forbidden, when suddenly my new math teacher, to my horror, showed up and sat down by my side. Against my expectation, he looked friendly, and he wondered if I had the cigarette brand, printed on one end of a cigarette, closest to the mouth when I smoked. “Yes, I have, I said.” “Me too, he said.” We managed to take a few puffs and so we hurried on, separately, to the school. The next couple of years math was my favorite subject, the only thing I took seriously. Those times when I acted without moralizing later in life I owe to my concrete experience with MA. Lindholm.

I have indeed, with delight, read Janov’s Reflection “The Merger of Nature and Nurture” in which he pours scientific information from his head and simultaneously bridges to external sources. However, without 40 years of experience of what happened to me in the womb in 1940, this Reflection had stopped at the verbal, where there are words. The non-verbal part, that which is about emotion, pain, experiences and sensations before I had words, I had not been able satisfactorily to interpret “The Merger of Nature and Nurture.”

The ingenious form of pedagogy, that the avantgardist Raphael Ortiz practiced in NY in the 60’s and which Art Janov later developed and followed up in “The Primal Scream” with naked and revealing emotional and physical traumas from patients driven to desperation, meant the way into the non-verbal for me. Then I got in touch with my feelings and realized that there were repressed reactions in my body and mind that at best could be re-lived and influenced / cured. This pedagogic successfully made the uncertainty less uncertain.

Jan Johnsson