Das Leben bildet

Education – that is stuff of my life, my own personal biography; it is what I have made out of life and what life has made out of me. Key individual experiences such as falling in love, sickness, defeat or encounters with death all leave their mark on us. That is known well enough – not, however, that the most basic learning situations take place in a pre-speech realm: in the phases of early childhood in which speech has not yet been completely developed as well as in later phases of life when events take place below the conscious threshold. Images arise of ourselves and the world around us which serve as working models for practical everyday life. The educationist and psychoanalyst Günther Bittner designates the Ego on this level as the proto-self. In one’s own autobiographical story the reflexive subject affirms existing educational processes. Such language-based communications are important sources of information for determining individual educational processes. Stories entailing phases of psychoanalytical illness also elucidate how a particular human being has been constituted as the person depicted in his or her own life history.