NW 21: What can be the Value of a Psychoanalytic Approach in Education for Knowing and Acting?

Network
NW 21 Education and Psychoanalysis 

Title
What can be the Value of a Psychoanalytic Approach in Education for Knowing and Acting?

Abstract
There are many ways to respond to ECER 2026 general Call in the frame of Network 21. We suggest below a few ideas that could be explored in this conference from a perspective linking education and psychoanalysis. Questioning the social utility of educational research in a context of “Poly-crisis” will be an opportunity to focus on the conditions for producing psychoanalytically oriented research.

The Call
The ECER 2026 call for papers “seeks to motivate participants to ponder the production and uses of education research [...]. How is scholarly knowledge in and of education, its methodologies and the practices based thereon, fit to understand and address the poly-crisis in the context where the very conditions of scientific knowledge are in flux?”

How might these issues be tackled from a psychoanalytically oriented clinical perspective? This call is a good opportunity to consider how our research and methodologies are taken into account by decision-makers and practitioners in the fields of education, healthcare and social work. Although psychoanalysis oriented research is rarely promoted at a macro-institutional level, many professionals and practitioners in the field, point to the value and validity of this kind of approach for training and accompanying professionals in their “primary task” (Rice, 1958).

This exploration of the value of the knowledge produced by a psychoanalysis oriented research will give us an opportunity to examine the process of ordering research and/or training: who makes the order? Through which agents? Are requests for this kind of research linked to interpersonal relationships or to a broader social demand? We note that very often the setting up of clinical training programmes in educational institutions is linked to interpersonal relationships: is this a condition? What effects might these links have on the training programmes offered and on research results? Does the current demand for research on “mental health” have an impact on psychoanalytically oriented clinical research in education (Jackson, 2002)?

Another question raised for ECER 2026 conference is formulated as follows: “how, in the era of fake news, predatory journals or pressures of performativity, are we to secure the sincerity and authenticity of, as well as trust in, academic knowledge?” In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, published in 1932, Freud has already indicated that his approach should not be understood as the construction of a “worldview” (Weltanschauung) in the sense of an intellectual construct capable of resolving all the problems of our existence in a uniform manner based on a single overarching hypothesis. One of the characteristics of the psychoanalytic approach is its emphasis on the unique dimension of human experience, even though “individual psychology is also, from the outset, simultaneously social psychology” (Freud, 1921). This implies the need for tolerance of uncertainty and a constant questioning of the relevance of reference theories.

But in today’s world, where the very nature of the scientific approach is being questioned or even attacked, where “alternative facts” sometimes find more resonance than facts linked to verifiable experience, under what conditions can the subjective position of teachers and researchers, in line with their students or their field, still find points of reference? And finally, does the tension between the notion of “truth” in psychoanalysis and traditional conceptions of “truth” in research not deserve to be re-examined in today’s context?

Possible presentation formats in Network 21 are Posters, Papers, Long papers, Symposia, Research Workshops.

Contact Person(s)
Arnaud Dubois – arnaud.dubois(at)u-paris.fr
Patrick Geffard – patrick.geffard(at)univ-paris8.fr

References
Freud, S. (1921). Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Publication in English: (1955). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Standard Edition, t. XVIII, 69-143.

Freud, S. (1932). Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Publication in English: (1964). New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Standard Edition, t. XXII, 5-182.

Jackson, E. (2002). Mental Health in Schools: What about the Staff?: Thinking about the Impact of Work Discussion Groups for Staff in School Settings. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 28, 129-147.

Rice, A. K. (1958). Productivity and social organisation: The Ahmedabad experiment: Technical innovation, work organisation and management. Tavistock Publications. [Reprinted 2001. Abingdon: Routledge.]