In 1937, Sigmund Freud famously declared education to be an impossible profession . Educating —just like analyzing and governing —Freud remarked, is an occupation “in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results”. The constant risk of failure in these professions, we learn from Freud , is predicated on their highly contextual nature, their permanent standing at the threshold between the terminable and the interminable, and perhaps most importantly, on account of the multivariate ways we symptomatize the antagonism between the principles of reality and pleasure .
Around four decades later, and during a press conference in Rome, Jacques Lacan —known for revitalizing psychoanalysis through his work marked by a radical “return to Freud” —brought back the statement Freud had made about the impossible professions . Focusing on education , and educators , in particular, Lacan indicated that “there is no shortage of people who receive the stamp of approval [and who are thus] authorized to educate”. “This does not mean”, he continued, “that they have the slightest idea what is involved in educating . People don’t perceive very clearly what they are wanting to do when they educate”. Then, and in highlighting the appearance of symptoms in the act of educating , he adds that educators “become gripped with anxiety when they think about what it is to educate (…) One perceives…that at the root of education there lies a certain idea of what one must do to create men - as if it were education that did so” (2008, pp. 55–56). What might this tell us about the relationship between psychoanalysis and education?
The difficulty in knowing exactly what it is that takes place in the act of educating , the anxiety inherent to educating and being educated, and the deeply felt intuition that it is a process related to the creation of men (and potentially also their destruction) are aspects that illuminate two interrelated dimensions of education . One is that it is an act fundamentally mediated by the question for the formation of a self into a subject . The other is that this process of cultivation of subjectivity is one that is marked by symptomatic expression .
What establishes a link, then, between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the field of curriculum studies appears initially as a concern for the existential drama of being and becoming , the universal and substantial aspects of humanity that operate behind the practical operations of education , and the attention to desire , suffering , and enjoyment that inscribe our biographies. Importantly for this perspective is that these aspects just mentioned find expression, as well as concealment, through the signifying chains of words and symptoms .
But pursuing the challenge of delineating an understanding of the phenomenon of curriculum from a specifically Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective requires that we situate first the notion of curriculum we are working from, the tradition in which it stands, and that we sketch out the specificity of a psychoanalytic approach based on the work of Jacques Lacan .
Historically, the academic field of curriculum has been dominated—at least in the Anglo-American context—by a view that treats curriculum as a technical matter of designing, developing, implementing, and evaluating predefined outcomes in a school setting. A practice informed to a large extent by cognitive-behavioristic psychology , positivistic sociology, economics, and other disciplines inclined to social engineering, curriculum came to be seen as a matter of schooling , disciplinary content, teaching and learning, and techniques to make these processes of transmission and absorption more effective. In our times, such effectiveness is measured in relation to the achievement of higher test scores. This is what we can refer to as a traditional approach to curriculum.
However, and in contrast to this approach characterized by its reliance on predefined behavioral objectives, a radical shift started to take place among some scholars in the field of curriculum studies in the 1970s, a shift that came to be known as the Reconceptualization of curriculum. The reconceptualization represents a challenge to the established tradition, shifting the focus of attention from the managerial aspects of schooling and instruction , to an intellectual and scholarly understanding of educational experience (Pinar, 1999). The experience of educating and being educated is studied primarily in its cultural , psychic , gendered, philosophical, and historical dimensions.
Subjective reconstruction , not politics or instructional tricks, is what we find at the heart of a reconceptualized field of curriculum studies .
In its interest for the subjectively existing individual , and the potentiality for subjective reconstruction , a reconceptualized perspective of curriculum shows affinity with a notion of education that, in the German tradition, came to be expressed in the term Bildung . Loosely understood as the “cultivation of the inner self” , it is an understanding of education as a self-initiated process of formation directed at the enrichment of sensibility and character. In this sense, the expansion of our human substance (the ultimate task of existence in this view) is something that occurs through the practice of study : a spiritually enhancing discipline of intellectual engagement with alterity and knowledge . Important for this tradition, as Wilhelm von Humboldt —the first in developing an academic theory of Bildung —insisted, the necessary foundation for an authentic education is to be found in the humanities : literature, philosophy , art, history, linguistics, and religion.
These elements that conform a notion of curriculum in a reconceptualized perspective are what constitute the concept of curriculum used and affirmed throughout this book.
Interestingly, and when it comes to the formation of a psychoanalyst, both Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan maintained that those in the process of becoming analysts must first become well versed in the humanities , just as Bildung and a reconceptualized understanding of curriculum emphasize. But what makes a Lacanian approach to psychoanalysis distinct? While the work of Jacques Lacan cannot be understood but in direct relation to Freud,1 there are some emphases in Lacan that cast psychoanalytic work in a different light.
Suffice it to briefly mention at this point three of these aspects that help clarify the specificity of psychoanalysis in Lacanian terms.
The first one refers to the frames of reference to understand and talk about psychic phenomena. Before Lacan , the study and practice of psychoanalysis had remained largely confined to the dimension of the clinical , and it strugg...