Conference Agenda

In institutional contexts, the emphasis on diversity is increasingly seen as a way of encompassing issues of gender and sexuality, and of encouraging politics of visibility and representation that celebrate the multiplicity of identities, and the joy of both embodying them and living with them (Ahmed, 2012). This tendency, if it produces preventive effects on LGBTQI-phobic violence and is part of a certain interpretation of "pride", is sometimes denounced by the workers concerned, as well as by activists, as an imperative, an order that would demand a pantomime of happiness and gratitude (ibid.) : "oh, what a joy to be seen and included !", is what people involved are sometimes supposed to express.
However, this sense of diversity also questions the effects it can have on those who are supposed to embody this diversity, and loudly claim it, especially by being "out" (Sedgwick, 1990) in sometimes reactionary or hostile institutions. What about those who are asked to hold a standard of being the safe-diversity-poster person, of being reassuring, or even, similar to certain pupils and patients (Bourlez, 2018; Horvitz, 2011). The question then arises of the tension between this sense of diversity, and the possible encounter that can occur between teachers and students, or therapists and queer patients, believing they recognize each other, or expected to. What room then is left for alterity, and what temporing to the framework might the shift from complicity to connivance imply?

The diversity of theoretical references is constitutive of the field of education and training sciences. In this discipline, a sociological conception of education has long prevailed, targeting an individual who is conscious and determined by his habitus, by dispositions characteristic of his social and cultural origin. Inequalities from birth are said to be reproduced by educational institutions, in particular by the school. Didactics, for its part, has developed a fairly abstract vision of the learner as an epistemic subject, centred on his cognitive functioning. It was not until relatively recently that the subject was granted agentivity, a capacity to act, to be a social actor from a very young age. Or to see him attributed, under the influence of psychology, emotions, self-esteem, even an affective life.
When we mobilise psychoanalysis as a central reference, combined with a clinical approach that weaves together subjectivity and the social-historical moment, we distance ourselves from these dominant conceptions. The encounter between psychoanalysis and education is indeed a troublemaker, especially when thought of in its time. Our approach aims to account for the encounter between adult and child, between professional and learner, and the influence of the peer group, in a configuration that is always singular; it aims to account for subjectivity, for the experience of the Subject. In the same movement of knowledge, it is a question of taking into account the involvement, the counter-transference of a researcher subject in his research object. Several authors have already developed this point and, among the most recent, let us quote a contribution by Claudine Blanchard-Laville (2019) to which we fully subscribe.
For all that, psychoanalysis in the field of education and training does not constitute a homogeneous reading, a new theoretical ecumenism, proceeding in a cumulative way or by compilation. It should be even less a doxa. The interpretations of contemporary educational phenomena are diverse, multiple, as is the understanding of what would be the cause or origin of them. A single example from our work is the question of the 'crisis of education', perceived as the failure of educational institutions (Lebrun), blamed on a 'crisis of authority' equivalent for some Lacanians to a foreclosure of the 'Name-of-the-Father' (Melman, Winter, etc.). The idea of decline is flourishing, referring to an idealised past and to well-identified educational and parental functions in a patriarchal system. However, there is every reason to believe, with Arendt, but also with a transgenerational and not exclusively Oedipal psychoanalytical reading, that education is in crisis as a transmission and link between generations, between old and newcomers (Gavarini, 2023). These interpretations and readings bear witness to the diversity of positions and currents of thought, of the ruptures, which have marked the history of the encounter between psychoanalysis and education, and between psychoanalysis and society. It is hardly possible today to speak of the place of psychoanalysis and erase the rough edges of this diversity. We have inherited a turbulent history and our intellectual work consists in bearing witness to it, just as the psychic work of the cure bears witness to the conflicts and misunderstandings to which we have been exposed or of which we have been the subjects.
This observation of a great diversity of psychoanalytical readings leads us to understand how we ourselves use psychoanalysis: what uses, what precautions, what ethics? These questions also lead us to reflect on the conditions necessary to think / theorise from the singularity of situations apprehended by the clinic.

If one takes a look at the german discourse on professionalization in teaching, it is noticeable that the concepts of reflection and reflexivity are gaining more and more importance (Kratz 2022, Dlugosch & Kratz 2022). This is especially true for its biography-oriented strand, which is currently experiencing an enormous upswing.
Teachers as "reflective practitioners" (Hauser, Wyss 2021), have become an inseparable part of professionalization discourses related to teaching (Dlugosch Kratz 2022). Similar ideas also emerge in anglophone discourse, drawing on diverse theoretical frameworks (Brookfield, 2009). This paradigm is closely associated - largely across school systems - with the ability to adopt "professional agency" (Kuorelathi et al. 2015) and to engage in building relationships with students who are perceived as challenging (Rae et al., 2017).
Mostly detached from each other, new theoretical reflections and didactic formats appear in this discourse, which are supposed to be theoretically justified and practically produced by trainee teachers as reflective practitioners (Paseka, Schneider & Compe 2018). This again reveals considerable theoretical openness (Hascher & Hagenauer, 2016). This close succession, and with it the vagueness of its theoretical anchoring, is now itself negotiated as an unreflective tradition (Hauser, Wyss 2021: 8).
In our contribution, we align ourselves with this skeptical view and combine it with the observation that, contrary to the diversity of theoretical concepts and higher education didactic offerings, "reflective practitioners" continue to elude empirical visibility in the field (Helsper 2011, 163).
In detail, we show that the central categories of the discourse "reflection" and "reflexivity" suffer from a theoretical deficit, which is particularly noticeable due to the exclusion of psychoanalytic knowledge. In our opinion, the categories are not (yet) suitable as a "Vanishing point of teacher education" (Dlugosch, Kratz 2022). Although Datler & Wininger (2016), for example, plead for a psychoanalytically guided understanding of emotion as the core of a university education, its structural anchoring and praxeology remain unclear.
To systemize this working hypothesis, we focus on a metaphor which is used repeatedly in connection with the concepts of reflection and reflexivity in the discourse of professionalization related to teaching. In our estimation, with the aim of overcoming the lack of theory.
Here, one can read about "experimental spaces" (Völter 2018) and "fantasy spaces" (Helsper 2018, p. 73) as well as "spaces for biographical and memory work" (ibid.) in which reflection is supposed to be made possible. This metaphor of space is thereby, contrary to its metaphorical range of meaning, very concrete and curricularly conceived in the texts and fails to negotiate space as something social that itself emerges from sociality.
With references to selected psychoanalytic metaphors of space, especially those of Alfred Lorenzer (1973), Donald Winnicott (Winnicott 1965/2006) and Wilfred Bion (1992), we broaden the view and offer new perspectives for the discourse on professionalization in teaching. In doing so, we negotiate that spaces of reflection as social entities can emerge or be prevented in institutional and organizational contexts.