This proposal for a paper falls within the framework of the emerging researchers’conference, while being inspired by the special call of the NW13 Philosophy of Education: Education and Psychoanalysis, on the theme of the "relationship to knowledge".

For this paper I propose to identify how my relationship to knowledge (Beillerot, 1989) influences my practice as a trainer and teacher-researcher. As my research falls within the “clinical approach, psychoanalytically oriented” (Blanchard-Laville et al, 2005), I am reflecting in the context of a doctoral thesis on the resurgence of the “self-pupil” in teachers' practices.

Numerous research studies have shown that teachers' experience as pupils partly determines their relationship to knowledge, to the scholar form and to the institution in which they work (Mosconi, Beillerot, and Blanchard-Laville, 2000; Blanchard-Laville, 2001 and 2013; Yelnik, 2005: Dubois, 2011; etc.). After these authors, I wonder about the ways in which their professional practices are also influenced by their experience as former students, and by the figures of teachers they have met? How much of teachers' school history is brought up to date when they meet their pupils?  What part of the “self-pupil” (Filloux, 1974; Blanchard-Laville, 2001) is still present in the teacher in a professional situation? How does the pupil's background influence the teacher's professional choices?

The concept of “relationship to knowledge”, which has met with great success in France, has been theorized by two research teams, as Bernard Charlot writes in his article: “The question of the relationship to knowledge, convergences and differences between two approaches”. (Charlot, 2006). The Escol de Paris-VIII team, to which Bernard Charlot belongs, and the research team Knowledge and relationship to knowledge, created in educational sciences at the Université Paris-Ouest-Nanterre by J. Beillerot. In her article " The relationship to teachers' knowledge", Claudine Blanchard-Laville (2013) nevertheless specifies that when J. Beillerot defended his doctorate in 1987, he had already entitled his doctoral thesis, Knowledge and relationship to knowledge: intimate disposition and social grammar, thus showing the dual psychological and social inscription of the notion. In order to clarify the distinctions between the two approaches, the author writes: "but their declinations of this notion differ from ours by the theories of the subject that their approaches convoke, theories that do not primarily support the subject of the unconscious. For our part, the notion of relation to knowledge has always been understood, since the first works of J. Beillerot (1987), as referring to a subject whose psychoanalysis contributes to make us aware of the development of the psychic life." It is therefore from this perspective, namely that of the Paris X Nanterre team, that I am referring to when I evoke the notion of relationship to knowledge.

Thus, I will try to clarify the ways in which I have built up a singular relationship to knowledge, particularly in relation to my self-pupil, a self-pupil himself resulting in part from the relationship with my father who was a teacher in secondary school, and to analyse how this relationship to knowledge influences unconsciously my teaching practice.

The research work undertaken therefore refers to the “clinical approach, psychoanalytically oriented”, and to refer to this movement of thought is first of all to refer to the "psychoanalysis and education" current, of which Jeanne Moll and Mireille Cifali proposed a collection of articles in their book "Pedagogy and Psychoanalysis" (Moll, Cifali 1985). It was first Sandor Ferenczi, in a conference he entitled "Pedagogy and Psychoanalysis", who laid the foundations of this disciplinary field in 1908. Sigmund Freud himself in August Aichhorn's "Wayward Youth" (Freud, 1925/1961) wrote in this connection: "…none of the applications of psycho-analysis, has excited so much interest, and aroused so many hopes, and none, consequently, has attracted so capable workers as its use in the theory and practice of education." Referring to the psychoanalysis and education movement also referred to the so-called "psychoanalytical pedagogy", movement formed around three pioneers: an educator, August Aichhorn (1878-1949), a teacher, Hans Zulliger (1893-1965), and a pastor, Oskar Pfister (1873-1956). Relying on psychoanalysis in the field of education also means relying on “the psychoanalytical current of Institutional Pedagogy”, as proposed by Arnaud Dubois in his thesis (in 2011), a movement born in France in the 1960’s under the impetus of Fernand Oury and Aida Vasquez, notably with the publication of the book “Towards an Institutional Pedagogy” in 1967. Of course, to refer to psychoanalysis is to refer to the authors who developed this original approach to the human being, where "the ego is not master in its own house" as S. Freud wrote in his "Introduction to Psychoanalysis" (Freud, 1917). Today in France, it is also an association of researchers and the electronic journal they publish (Cliopsy): “clinical approach, psychoanalytically oriented implemented in the field of education and training”, whose last Congress held in 2017 was entitled: "Education, training and psychoanalysis: an insistent topicality." The methodology I use is therefore the "clinical approach, psychoanalytically oriented ", which mobilises the contributions of psychoanalysis in an attempt to grasp some of the psychological issues at work in professional situations. In this theoretical approach, the subjectivity of the researcher is recognized and assumed. The psychic elaborations of the counter-transferential movements of the researcher are put at the service of research (Devereux, 1980; Blanchard-Laville, 1999; Chaussecourte 2017).

I will therefore support the idea that my relationship to knowledge, was partly constructed in the relationship with my father, who was a mathematics teacher in secondary school. Indeed, I think I can say that my relationship to knowledge was built up in the “transferential relationship” and in the identifying processes between a father and his son. Thus I am convinced that I have inherited in the construction of my relationship to knowledge, that of my father, and therefore that which his encounter with the National Education system had inscribed in him. Nevertheless, if I focus here on the relationship to knowledge that I inherited, I also note that during the teenage period, I was largely opposed (traces of the Oedipus complex) to this father-knowing, in order to build my own self. I therefore subsequently rejected this traditional, vertical and asymmetrical relationship to knowledge, and it is undoubtedly this process of opposition that allowed me to create a singular “relationship to knowledge”. Indeed, I seem to have noticed that during my training as a “specialized educator”, when I was passionately discovering libertarian pedagogies (Neil), pedagogical attempts (Deligny), cooperative (Freinet) and institutional (Oury) pedagogies, a shift in my relationship to knowledge took place. I now interpret these initial impulses as a movement to explore the opposite of what I had known. Could this strong attraction to "alternative" pedagogies be the expression of the traces of this singular relationship to knowledge in which I have built myself? Today I therefore perceive my interest in the pedagogical question as the result of a " reaction formation " (Freud, 1905), of a repetition in its opposite to what I had known. It would seem, therefore, that it is this 'relationship to' that allows me today to build myself a professional-self teacher (Abraham, 1984).

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