The Eden Project - In Search of the Magical Other
“The greatest gift to others is our own best selves.”
Let’s be real. Teaching is a superhero’s job. We wear so many hats and we make about 1,500 decisions a day.
While we’re not exactly fighting off bank robbers in broad daylight, preventing a hostile take-over by aliens, or even walking around with capes (if you do, DM me where you got yours), the demands that are required by educators are exhausting, and sometimes unrealistic.
According to James Hollis, his book The Eden Project - In Search of the Magical Other takes a Jungian approach to understanding relationships, both within ourselves and others.
However, to understand our relationships with others begins with trying to understand ourselves.
It’s this idea that in every relationship we encounter, be it intimate, platonic, or professional, we are constantly hiding or projecting ourselves onto the ‘Other.’
The ‘Self’ is you and the ‘Other’ is someone else.
While this book focuses much on the dynamics between partners, the portion I want to discuss here is how we need to be made more aware of who we are. Like how it’s encouraged to have your life put together before committing to a relationship, we as educators must find ways to be ‘healthy and whole’ if we really want to bring out the best in our students.
So how do we hide or project onto others like our students?
That begins with looking deep within ourselves and discovering our ‘shadows’ and ‘wounds.’
Hollis claims that we all suffer ‘wounds’ from childhood that derive from trying to adapt to the ‘needs’ of our parents/guardians/caretakers. Like both Hollis and Jung claim, the ‘wounds’ we suffer growing up lie dormant within ourselves as our ‘shadows’ until it’s made aware.
“Children are driven unconsciously in a direction that is intended to compensate for everything that was left unfulfilled in the lives of their parents.”
My need growing up was to be acknowledged to address my father’s projection of ‘perfection’ on me. This is probably why I constantly seek some form of positive acknowledgment from others, especially from my parents.
Imagine the grief and shame I felt when I came home from university one day to tell my dad that I switched from my computer science major to education.
While my mother was relatively affectionate, it was my father that I secretly wanted to impress all throughout childhood, no matter how rebellious I later became. Sometimes I wonder if my dad felt the need for acknowledgment growing up that was later projected onto me.
In the classroom, I would hound my students to keep digging to give me their best work no matter what.
“Nah, go back and write more reasons about why DeAndre Hopkins is your role model.” [writing essays]
“This pizza that you drew and cut out is supposed to show your understanding of fractions but it looks like it took you 5 min to do this. Is this what you want others in the hallway to see?” [math display on our bulletin board']
“Oberon, Oberon, Oberon... This isn’t a competition to see if you memorized your lines. I’ve already told you to slow down and enunciate so we can all hear what you’re saying.” [practicing scenes from A Midsummer’s Night Dream by Shakespeare]
Day in and day out, I kept poking, pushing, and prodding my students to try harder until their work became ‘perfect.’
In a way, I may have repressed my need for perfection at first as a teacher but as years went on, ended up projecting my childhood wounds onto my students.
While having high standards is not inherently a bad thing, it gets dangerous when you try to sacrifice your own mental health and your student-teacher relationships without knowing why.
Now why do I bring up the ‘wounds’ we suffered growing up?
Well, if you don’t acknowledge your wounds, they live and grow in your ‘shadow.’
Hollis makes it apparent that when we are unaware of our wounds, our shadows either become repressed or projected onto others.
“… what we wish not to acknowledge about ourselves — our narcissism, our selfishness, our rage and so on, all the shadow stuff — gets repressed and/or projected onto the Other.”
Once we discover our shadows and bring them to light (get it?), then we become aware of what we are doing or saying in the classroom.
That’s when we can take a step back and reassess the situation to ask ourselves:
Am I being too hard on them?
If this was supposed to be fun, am I ruining it?
Isn’t that enough work for today?
What I learned from this moving forward is that while I have acknowledged my own shadows, I have to remain cognizant of how I project my childhood wounds onto Others, especially my students.
I need to learn more about myself and keep myself in check before I send my class in a direction that some may never truly recover from.
What if their dislike for school begins with me?
What if they stop putting in more effort in fear of rejection?
What if they start developing a constant need for acknowledgment?
As someone who works with children, or has children of your own, what ‘shadows’ do you have lurking?
As Hollins described, we cannot expect the Other in any relationship to address our wounds.
What are we unintentionally trying to repress or project onto Others? Our peers? Our students?
Truth is that no Other can ‘fix’ us by addressing our wounds. We need to look in the mirror and try to understand more of who we are if we want to become effective educators because our careers stem from the foundation of relationships.
Oh and by the way, Hollins claims that as we journey to understand ourselves and our wounds more, we will still never truly know who we are. However, I would argue that it’s part of the excitement.
“… the Self [is] forever unknown, unknowable.”
So here’s my question for you:
