Being a teacher in “complex times”

from social malaise to teaching malaise – dialogues at the Psychoanalysis and Education interface

Abstract

This study focuses on analyzing teachers’ discomfort from a psychoanalytic perspective. To this end, in dialogues with Freud and authors of psychoanalytic studies in the field of education, it is based on the assumption that there are teaching discomforts that transcend the strictly academic dimension as it is a profession threatened by the symbolic precariousness of the place it occupies in the social context. The teaching narratives extracted from three studies included in the Psychoanalysis and Education interface point to complex and challenging impasses that cause discomfort among teachers today: the devaluation of the profession and unsatisfactory working conditions, the problem of violence and school indiscipline, the loss of teaching autonomy and crisis of teaching authority in contemporary schools, the lack of recognition, the blaming of teachers for school failures associated with excessive demands and expectations directed at the figure of the teacher coming from various directions (school curriculum, specialists, parents, students, community , State), among others, have repercussions on the discomfort among teachers, who, at times, manifest psychological ailments and different forms of renunciation in relation to the profession. It is concluded that, faced with the malaise in civilization and education, teachers want – and need – to speak out. In this direction, Psychoanalysis emerges as a possibility to circulate the word, that is, to build with and for teachers sensitive and welcoming spaces for speaking and listening, so that possible solutions can emerge from the elaboration and resignification of the anguish inherent to existence and educating, in contexts characterized by contemporary complexity, allowing new ways of subjectivation and confronting reality.