“Entender tudo ‘isso’”? educação, desigualdade social, psicanálise

Abstract

Through a dialogue between education, social inequality and psychoanalysis, the study proposes an analysis of the social and psychological environment in which the low-income subject is driven towards the wish to overcome exclusion through the production and inclusion of knowledge. The research results from the discomfort triggered in a classroom environment with students who showed little self-confidence concerning academic knowledge. Their anecdotes reveal an undoubtful effort to keep up with their studies; notwithstanding, when facing the need to legitimize a long-time fulfillment — to go to university — they lingered between disqualifying academic knowledge and disbelieving their own intellectual potential. Based on the description of four excerpts of those students’ life stories, the research makes use of the psychoanalytic method supported by listening and by transferential interpretation in order to reflect on what has possibly caused such dynamics. In face of the freudian theory and of a scenario of social inequality, the study presents a possible interpretation of the Freudian “it” as a subjective articulation on two defensive mechanisms: disbelief-unrealization in the doubt realm. In this reconstruction, the students seem to have attributed to this double dilemma the response to their own self-disbelief in relation to their intellectual capacity and to their unrealization of academic knowledge, such as in the students’reply: “all of ‘it’, professor”? This is, therefore, a study which, by proposing a dialogue between education, social inequality and psychoanalysis, aims at a more thorough, comprehensive understanding of the intrapsychic and interpersonal phenomena, ultimately, of their complex, dynamic interconnection, from the point of view of the unconscious, in the process of achieving quality education