From a psychoanalytic perspective, many things are not merely their functional appearances or phenomena but are imbued with emotional and symbolic meanings, forming psychological symptoms that transcend their original attributes. For example: money, power, food. Similarly, "learning" – especially in the Chinese context – has become a symbolic carrier of parental anxiety, social competition, class mobility, and many other meanings.
Parental Anxiety About Children's Learning and Its Traumatic Origins
In Chinese family education, children's academic performance is often the focal point of parental anxiety. This anxiety doesn't stem purely from concerns about children's future development but, at a deeper level, involves parents' own traumatic experiences and sociocultural inheritance.
Resource Scarcity and Persecutory Insecurity
Psychoanalytic theory suggests that in early life stages, infants are highly dependent on mothers or caregivers. If infants feel nurturing resources are unstable or insufficient during this stage, they experience a threat to survival, producing intense "insufficiency feelings" or "survival anxiety." This scarcity feeling becomes internalized as an adult psychological characteristic, forming a strong "I'm not good enough" sensation that further influences attitudes toward offspring.
In Chinese families, this scarcity feeling is closely tied to cultural background. China experienced decades of rapid social change, with the parental generation mostly experiencing material scarcity and social turbulence, reinforcing their perception of future uncertainty. Although material life has improved presently, this early scarcity feeling continues to subconsciously influence parents' psychology – they often feel they must somehow ensure their children can "win" the future.
This mindset stems not only from individual early experiences but is deeply influenced by traditional Chinese culture. In ancient China, the belief that "all trades are inferior, only studying is superior" was deeply rooted in society, with education viewed as the only path to changing one's fate. From the imperial examination system to the modern college entrance examination, education became the primary means for individuals and families to acquire social resources and status. This intergenerational transmission of ideas further deepens parents' excessive focus and anxiety about their children's learning.
Against this background of insecurity and resource scarcity, learning becomes a core anxiety point. Parents believe that only through academic excellence can children secure limited resources in future competition. This anxiety reflects parents' subconscious urgency about survival resources, as if failing to seize this educational "opportunity" would severely threaten future living space.
Parental Narcissistic Extension and Object Relations
Another psychological driver of parental anxiety lies in parents' unprocessed narcissistic needs. Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut pointed out that when individuals fail to develop independent object relations, they view others as extensions of themselves to satisfy their emotional needs. Winnicott termed this object-relating rather than object-usage.
Kohut's Self Psychology theory emphasizes that when individuals fail to establish a solid self-structure, they maintain their psychological integrity through others (in this case, children). Parents with narcissistic injuries use children as selfobjects to repair emotional deficiencies formed during their own development.
In the parenting process, many Chinese parents view children as extensions of themselves, expecting children to fulfill dreams or goals they never achieved. If children fail to meet these expectations, parents' narcissistic injuries are activated, triggering intense anxiety and controlling behaviors.
Meanwhile, Melanie Klein's "part-object" theory helps understand this phenomenon. She believed that in early years, individuals view others as "part-objects," focusing only on specific functions or attributes rather than treating them as complete persons. Parents' excessive focus on children's academic performance precisely reflects this "part-object" usage: they don't view children as complete individuals with independent value, but only focus on whether children can succeed academically and bring honor and security to the family.
Parents' Complex Emotions Toward Children: Envy and Destruction
Beyond resource scarcity feelings and narcissistic projections, Klein's "envy" theory further explains parental anxiety about children's academic performance. Klein believed that early in life, individuals develop envy toward "good objects," especially when perceiving others possess something they lack, and this envy motivates them to destroy these "good things."
As we've discussed in previous psychoanalytic parenting articles, the nurturing process naturally activates parents' unmet emotional needs and traumas. During China's rapid social development over decades, parents' own developmental experiences were often filled with uncertainty and scarcity. Against this background, seeing children enjoy more material opportunities further triggers parents' deep traumatic emotions: opportunities they never had are now manifested in their children. This should be joyful but often accompanies impulses of envy and destruction.
Klein's theory suggests that when parents see children achieve academic success, complex emotional responses emerge: on one hand, they desire children's success, but on the other, they may subconsciously resist seeing children surpass them. This internal contradiction often manifests as intense parental anxiety about children's academic performance. They might outwardly encourage children while subconsciously hoping children don't become too successful, as that would further activate their unresolved narcissistic injuries.
This potential envy also influences parental evaluations and attitudes toward children's academic performance. For instance, when children achieve good results, parents might outwardly express happiness but cannot genuinely provide sufficient affirmation, even imposing additional pressure or demands, further burdening children. This intertwining of envy and destructiveness often transforms into excessive anxiety about children's education, affecting children's performance.
Parental Separation Anxiety and Limits on Children's Independence
When discussing parental anxiety about children's learning, projection is a crucial defense mechanism. Many parents accumulated unprocessed anxieties and traumas during their development, which are easily reactivated while raising children. When facing unresolvable anxieties, parents often unconsciously project these emotions onto their children.
Particularly regarding children's education, parental anxiety often extends beyond concerns about performance to manifest an inability to separate. On one hand, parents want children to "achieve greatness"; on the other, they worry children's success might threaten their psychological self-esteem. Subconsciously, parents may resist children becoming truly independent individuals, as this suggests they themselves might feel abandoned or lose control over children.
Learning and Its Traumas
In this environment where cultural inheritance and personal psychological trauma intertwine, parental anxiety displays intensely traumatic characteristics. The traditional "imperial examination dream," personal psychological scarcity feelings, and parents' unhealed narcissistic injuries, envy, and separation anxiety collectively constitute extreme attention to children's education. This affects not only family relationships but also transforms learning itself into a competitive resource, inseparable from anxiety, pressure, and fear.
In this social environment, many people feel a collective unconscious pressure, still dominated by competition and survival anxiety. This anxiety permeates not only parent-child relationships but the entire social structure, forming an extreme pursuit of success. This psychological state internalizes into children's self-esteem issues, with many children feeling "inferior" due to poor performance, producing profound psychological trauma.
When learning is viewed as the only path to success, individuals may fall into two extremes: excessive worship and obsession with learning, or complete abandonment and negation of learning. In some extreme cases, the "knowledge is useless" argument becomes a psychological defense mechanism against unattainable social expectations and personal anxieties. When individuals feel unable to achieve success through learning, they might choose to deny learning's value to alleviate inner pain.
Low Self-Esteem Trauma from Learning
In the Chinese educational system, children are indoctrinated from an early age with the notion: "grades determine everything." This view comes not only from parents but also from schools, teachers, and the broader social environment. In such a system, children easily bind academic performance tightly with self-worth. If they perform poorly, they believe they cannot obtain social resources, love, or recognition. This belief forms a long-term trauma in their hearts, making them feel their self-worth severely depends on external performance metrics.
Moreover, many children are required by parents and schools to meet certain idealized standards during development, standards often too singular and narrow, ignoring individual diversity and uniqueness. When children's performance fails to meet these standards, they easily fall into self-doubt, believing their abilities in other areas are also unworthy of attention. This low self-esteem trauma from learning may continue affecting children's self-identity and psychological health into adulthood.
Even High-Performing Children Face Trauma
Although parental anxiety typically focuses on children with poor academic performance, high-achieving children equally face psychological difficulties. In the Chinese educational system, academically excellent children receive more protection and resources but simultaneously bear pressure from peers, society, and even within families.
Intellectually gifted children often feel lonely and excluded for exceeding peer levels. They recognize their academic superiority early yet grow increasingly distant from other children in the collective. This isolation makes them socially difficult and emotionally unresonant. Parents and teachers may focus more on their academic performance while neglecting their emotional needs, leaving these children emotionally unsupported.
Additionally, society places higher expectations on them due to their excellence. These high expectations often create enormous pressure, and in some cases, they may suppress their emotional needs, forming what Winnicott called a "false self" to meet external expectations.
Social Trauma Repair and Diverse Educational Practices
In recent years, with social progress and educational improvement, psychological trauma repair has gradually become an important topic in family and personal life. More people are trying to repair past traumas through psychological counseling, escaping long-suppressed anxiety and insecurity. Innovative educational practices have also emerged, with more diverse choices and evaluation criteria gradually being applied.
How Does Psychoanalysis Understand Learning?
From a psychoanalytic perspective, learning is not merely a means of acquiring knowledge but a process of emotional experience and psychological development. Psychoanalysis emphasizes that learning motivation stems not only from cognition of the external world but more deeply from individual exploration of inner emotions and experiences.
The Relationship Between Learning and Curiosity
Psychoanalysis believes learning originates from individual curiosity, directed not only toward the external world but also exploring the inner world. From birth, infants are curious about themselves, their mothers, and surrounding environments. They are curious not only about their bodies and perceptions but also about emotional experiences: curious about the mother's mental space, curious about their own mind; this curiosity is learning's initial driving force, propelling individuals to continuously explore and understand their inner experiences. (Reference reading: Maintaining Curiosity About the Inner World.)
However, if children feel their emotions are not permitted during development, especially those considered destructive (like anger, jealousy, hatred), they may no longer dare to be curious about their inner feelings. This emotional suppression may directly affect their learning motivation because they no longer dare to explore complex inner emotions, fearing these feelings might bring danger or destruction.
For example, if a child feels full of hatred, but parents deny or suppress this emotion, the child might feel their inner world is dangerous, thus losing curiosity about their own emotions. If individuals dare not face their inner emotions, they cannot fully engage in learning.
Learning Is an Integration Process
Young infants typically use splitting as a defense mechanism to handle complex external information during early development. Splitting helps them simply divide the world into "good" and "bad," finding some order in chaotic information.
As individuals develop, they gradually learn to integrate "good" and "bad," forming more mature cognitive abilities. This process resembles classification and definition in learning – by structuring complex knowledge, we can integrate, better understand, and digest external information.
Otherwise, if information is excessive, individuals will feel overloaded and overwhelmed in this process, potentially unable to effectively integrate this information, resulting in cognitive confusion. Just as designers understand, if facing too many options (e.g., more than seven), our brains struggle to process them similarly. In learning, if knowledge or emotional burdens are too great, children may become confused and anxious, struggling to effectively absorb and digest content.
The Relationship Between Anxiety and Knowledge
Learning itself is an anxiety-filled process. Whether exploring the unknown or integrating complex information, it may trigger individual anxiety. However, if individuals feel sufficient emotional support, this anxiety can be effectively contained and processed, ultimately becoming a driving force for cognitive development in the learning process.
But when parental anxiety excessively influences children, learning no longer becomes a process of exploration and understanding the world but a forced task. In this situation, knowledge is no longer viewed as a beneficial resource but becomes an external pressure source with persecutory qualities. Children feel learning itself is oppressive rather than a path to self-development, thereby developing resistance to learning.
Learning Is an Emotional Experience
In some cases, learning becomes purely intellectual thinking. This thinking is essentially full of conflict and repression, with many unexpressed impulses and emotions, making learning an intellectualized defense.
However, learning should not inherently be this over-intellectualized activity; it should be part of emotional experience. As emphasized in psychoanalytic training, it's not merely absorbing knowledge but "learning through experience."