Conference Agenda

For psychoanalytic theory, social reality is characterised by irremediable complexities, contradictions and dislocations that prevent the possibility of closure, totality or harmony. Education policy, by contrast, is subject to numerous fantasies, including fantasies of certainty, control, productivity, inclusion, and victimisation that ignore, mask or disavow the impossibility of closure or completion (Clarke, 2020; Carusi, 2022) and the play of the unconscious in shaping educators’ subjectivities (Shim, 2017). Indeed, education has come to embody, and hence carries the burden of responsibility for realising, the (unrealisable) future hopes, aspirations and potentials of today’s social order. Yet given the impossibility of fully realising these hopes in the present, it is necessarily to the future that society looks for redemption and progress through education, in what has become a familiar pattern characterised by endless deferral and repeated blame. The pressures of education’s future-oriented performativity continue to have significant implications for teachers, positioning them as instruments dedicated to the realisation of a future that never seems to arrive in a society (purportedly) cured of its social, economic and political ills through effective teaching.

The papers in this symposium use psychoanalytic terms to explore the bind for teachers in an education policy environment that insists they realise the impossible fantasies of the future through their teaching. With the discovery of the unconscious (Freud, 2010) and the role of fantasy in identification (Lacan, 2006), among other themes, psychoanalysis is particularly adept at bridging social fantasies articulated in education policy with the personal and policy-based identifications of teachers. The presentations in this symposium analyse the responsibilities policy and other governing discourses place on teachers and consider what new lines of thinking psychoanalysis makes available to teachers who actively disidentify with the fantasies education policy makes of them. Drawing on psychoanalytic concepts, including the unconscious, transference, drive, singularity, dupery, and ‘afterwardness’ (Nachträglichkeit, après coup), the papers presented in this symposium consider the attendant harms attributable to, as well as attempted flights from, education policy at various levels and scales, as the latter attempts to bend teachers to its pronouncements. The papers locate teachers and teacher education within psychoanalytic frameworks that attend to uncertainty and contingency as an essential feature – as opposed to a fatal flaw – of meaningful education, thereby opening new spaces for thought and practice in education.

Freud (1964) famously links education and psychoanalysis as impossibe professions. The sharing of impossibility between the analyst and the educator has received attention as a bridge between psychoanalysis and education (Bibby 2011, Britzman 2009). Yet, whereas psychoanalysis is oriented to the singularity of the analysand’s unconscious, education is primarily understood as an inherently normative venture and vehicle for fixing social problems (Carusi & Szkudlarek 2020). This difference is particularly acute for teachers whose colleges began as “normal schools” and who are instrumentalized in much of current policy and research as “effective” in raising student achievement - a proxy for economic mobility, social cohesion and other ends (Smeyers & Depaepe 2008). Considering the shared impossibility of the professions, what may the resistance of psychoanalysis to a normative framework suggest for education and its professionals? While the normative role of teaching is largely taken for granted, recent studies (Carusi 2017, 2022) have begun to question this status through Laclau’s (2014) distinction between the ethical and the normative, a distinction developed from Lacanian psychoanalysis. Through this distinction, the presentation will discuss the emphasis on effectivity and instrumentality as normative disavowals of the impossibility of education, and where there is disavowal, there is fantasy at work (Clarke, 2021). The second part of this presentation will consider education as a fantasy that sutures the holes of knowledge into the wholes of teachers as the subject supposed to know, to deliver, to save, to redeem and so on. In his seminars, Lacan (1974) introduces the portmanteau ‘edupation’ to his students, a combination of education and dupe. This presentation will argue edupation suggests an ethical dimension of teaching that remains resistant to normative capture. While aspects of edupation have been linked to education’s production of dupes for existing discourses (Soler, 2019), Lacan also characterises the dupe as a wanderer of the unconscious, a viator. For the conclusion of this presentation, the educator as viator will be sketched as a dupe of the unconscious and connected to the impossibility of the profession of education. This figure suggests a starting point for teacher education different from their connection to existing discourses of raising student achievement, for example. Instead, as viator, the impossibility of education becomes the terrain they wander hindered but never completely determined by the fantasies of policy to make them whole.

Bibby, T. (2011). Education, an impossible profession? Psychoanalytic explorations of learning and classrooms. Routledge. Britzman, D. P. (2009). The very thought of education: Psychoanalysis and the impossible professions. SUNY. Carusi, F. T. (2017). Why Bother Teaching? Despairing the Ethical Through Teaching that Does Not Follow. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 36, 633–645. Carusi, F. T. (2022). Refusing Teachers and the Politics of Instrumentalism in Educational Policy. Educational Theory, 72(3), 383–397. Carusi, F. T., & Szkudlarek, T. (2020). Education is society … and there is no society: The ontological turn of education. Policy Futures in Education, 18(7), 907–921. Clarke, M. (2021). Education and the fantasies of neoliberalism: Politics, policy, psychoanalysis. Routledge. Freud, S. (1964). Analysis Terminable and Interminable. In James Strachey (Trans.), Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 23: 209–254). Hogarth Press. Lacan, J. (1974). Seminar 5. In C. Gallagher (Trans.), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXI: Les Non Dupes Errent 1973-1974. Laclau, E. (2014). The rhetorical foundations of society. Verso. Smeyers, P., & Depaepe, M. (2008). Educational Research: The Educationalization of Social Problems. Netherlands: Springer. Soler, C. (2019). Prelude 2: The treatment of the bodies in our times and in psychoanalysis (L. Rodríguez, Trans.). 1–5.

Teachers today are frequently exhorted to enact ‘evidence-based’ teaching. Such exhortations reflect a view of teaching as primarily rational. By contrast, psychoanalysis attends to what Eric Santner (2001) refers to as the constitutive ‘too muchness’ (p. 8), a ‘certain uncanny animation’ or ‘an undeadness’ (p. 18), that characterises our psychic life. In this reading, drive conveys the relentless pulse of the bodily real, ceaselessly moving around its object in a closed circuit with “no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force” (Lacan, 1981, p. 165). Yet drive is also singular in the sense that it reflects the particular ways in which we have been traumatised and thus corresponds to our idiosyncratic ‘truth’ – a truth “which appears to everyone in its intimate specificity…. Nothing can be compared to it that allows it to be judged from the outside” (Lacan, 1992, p. 24). This Lacanian reading of drive offers fertile ground for conceptualising agency and resistance, creativity and criticality, in teaching and education. Crucially, our capacity for singularity is tied up with the ‘too-muchness’ of our being and the ‘undead’ energy of the drives. In Mari Ruti’s memorable words, “singularity thus relates to those parts of the drive that manage to ooze through the sieve of the various systems of organisation that are designed to stabilise human life” (2012, p. 21). As such, singularity allows us to “touch the living tissue of the world rather than merely perceiving its socially mediated significations” (p. 28). In this sense, singularity becomes a matter of finding idiosyncratic and creative ways of infusing the energies of the drive into the symbolic orders of evidence-based policy and practice, so as to resist and undermine the latters’ more standardised and ‘verbose’ registers, reflected in what Taubman (2009) refers to as ‘teaching by numbers’. This reading has potential for a) resisting narrative closure, discursive colonisation or institutional totalisation; b) developing a willingness to question dominant assumptions and assertions; and c) cultivating an openness to expansive conceptual vocabularies and experimental narratives for thought and action in teachers’ professional practices.

Lacan, J. (1992). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959-1960 (D. Porter, Trans.). New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (1981). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI:The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, 1964 (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. New York: Norton. Ruti, M. (2012). The singularity of being: Lacan and the immortal within. New York: Fordham University Press. Santner, E. (2001). On the psychotheology of everyday life. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Taubman, P. (2009). Teaching by numbers: Deconstructing the discourse of standards and accountability in education. New York: Routledge.

Upon entering teacher training, students often expect their training to provide a 'method' on which they can rely in their daily work as teachers; something that is scientifically researched and proven to ’work’, something that removes uncertainty from teaching. Yet when teaching in classrooms, student teachers are often confronted with aporiae in which they lack a rationale and the means to orient themselves. In Finnish teacher education, it has been repeatedly pointed out that no universal ’method’ can be provided. Instead, it has been emphasised that each student has to build his or her own teaching philosophy or theory during the course of their studies. It combines the scientific research knowledge acquired during courses, practical teaching activities and critical reflection on one's own actions and thinking. This allegedly prepares teachers to act in an autonomous way, something that has traditionally been respected in governing the Finnish education system. Following Taubman (2009), it is possible to interpret the hopes and fears of student teachers in relation to a ’method’ as a relation to a ’subject supposed to know’. This refers to a transferential relationship (Lacan 2017) in which the subject projects onto the Other an expectation of uncovering the basis and meaning of his/her own actions. The Other, however, has no answer as to what the subject should do. Failure to meet such impossible demands may cause frustration in students which cannot be completely avoided, but must be worked through. In this presentation, I will describe becoming a teacher from a Lacanian perspective as an apprenticeship in failure. It is a deeply a personal process where a new rapport with one’s fantasies can be established. Apprenticeship entails a temporal relationship called ‘afterwardness’ (Nachträglichkeit, après coup), in which the subject constructs the truth of its fantasies in hindsight. This result can only be achieved by first failing to achieve the ideal one is after and only through such an error, coming to see one’s own embeddedness in fantasy and learning to act without guarantees.

Lacan, J. (1977). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Hogarth Press. Lacan, J. (2017). Transference The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII. Polity. Taubman, P. M. (2009). Teaching by numbers: Deconstructing the discourse of standards and accountability in education. Routledge.

In this presentation, the author shares an exploration into her unconscious emotional world animated by a yearlong anti-racist project. The author frames the story of the antiracist project as difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998) and uses the psychoanalytic concept of transference (Winnicott, 1949) to symbolize and engage in the process of working through (Freud, 1913) her emotional experience. The author organizes the story of the antiracist project as (1) the “furor to teach,” fantasy of the antiracist educator, (2) difficulty with students’ uneven progress, (3) an attachment to and idealization of certainty, and (4) a racial melancholia. She presents that what is difficult about anti-racist education as an emotional situation is that educators must welcome what they do not know in a field that privileges and fantasizes knowledge and knowing. The author contends how her idealization of teaching and learning which reflects phantasies in the field of education resulted in her inability to accept her students’ uncertain progress. As an educator of colour, she also shares that she must negotiate the loss of idealised objects for her to better serve containing function (Bion, 1962) in supporting teacher candidates’ encounters with rack work.

Bion, W. R. (1962) Learning from Experience (London, UK, Heineman). Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Freud, S. (1913). On beginning the treatment. SE 12, 123-144. Winnicott, D. W. (1949). Hate in the counter-transference. Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, 3, 348-356.