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Q4:- If I can't find the solution, 1
feel defeated. Q5:- When
1 work something out, I feel like a void
is being filled. Q7:- If I
find the solution straightaway, I feel
really at peace. |
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I interpret the disagreeable feeling as a reminder of the "narcissistic wound" (recalled here in a symbolic form: wound - void - lack - defeat) and the search for the transformation of this feeling into its opposite: defeat into victory, lack into replenishment, disagreeable feeling into feeling at peace. |
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A 17-year-old girl well expresses the feelings of many students for whom failure in mathematics is felt as lack of intelligence:
<<When you can't do something, it's not that it isn't normal, it's not that you have a grudge against it ... it's difficult to say! I enjoy it when we're taught something, when we've something to do. To be able to do it. Because you have to be able to do it: it has to be at your level. You're given it, you have to be able to do it! Otherwise, as soon as there's a snag, something you can't do or you say, Drat What's going on? Why can't I do it? I'm stupid, it's no good!' ... That's how it is. When you're given something, you have to know how to do it. That's how it is in the course, in class: some can do it, others can't.>>
For students like this there are two sorts of people, those Who understand and those who don't. They also say you're either good or bad at maths". So mathematics, through its rigour, that is to say through its constant refusal to entertain ambiguity, will more than any other discipline, revive anxieties arising from noticing individual differences. And revive, perhaps more fundamentally, anxieties bout castration which manifest differences between the Sexes on which all other differences may be based.
<<One thing surprises me: there was a girl who was getting very good marks at the beginning of the year and then afterwards she wasn't doing so well. The teacher said to her, 'I thought you were intelligent, and you're not'. Drat! 1 reacted to that! If maths is a matter of intelligence, well 1 haven't got much. Well, I was a bit disheartened at this point, and then 1 said to myself. you're alright at French, there's not much logic in language, it must be a matter of a different sort of intelligence there. But 1 don't know, 1 ask myself, if you're good at maths, does that mean you're more intelligent than someone else? I don't believe that's the case ... in short, it depends. 1 have friends who are really good at maths, it's unimaginable! They do lots of theorems and exercises.>> |
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