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.

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