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.

Carusi, F.T. (2022), Refusing Teachers and the Politics of Instrumentalism in Educational Policy. Educational Theory. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12537 Clarke, M. (2020). Eyes wide shut: The fantasies and disavowals of education policy. Journal of Education Policy, 35(2), 151-167. Freud, S. (2010). The interpretation of dreams (J. Strachey, Trans.). Basic Books: New York, NY. Lacan, J. (2006). The mirror stage as formative of the I function as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. In B. Fink (Trans.), Ecrits: The first complete edition in English (pp. 75–81). Norton: New York, NY. Shim, J. M. (2017). Play of the unconscious in pre-service teachers’ self-reflection around race and racism. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 49(6), 830-847.