The traumatic aspect of naming: Psychoanalysis and the Freirean subject of (class) antagonism

Abstract

Deploying a Lacanian conceptual framework, this article interrogates the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Paulo Freire’s dialogical method of critical pedagogy. The paper advances the claim that the transformative efficacy of Freirean dialogue is rooted in its unique ability to confront and engage the repressed element of trauma, or what Lacan calls the real. The author suggests that the locus of trauma stands as the elusive, yet central and constitutive axis around which Freire’s dialogical engagement turns. Following psychoanalysis’ attention to biography, the paper first examines how Freire’s personal experience of exile informs his philosophical orientation to being, politics, and education. Turning to a specific classroom event Freire outlines in Pedagogy of Hope, the paper then develops a new interpretation of Freire’s idea of naming, and through Lacanian analysis, extends Freire’s insight on the relationship between psyche, ideology, and social antagonism. Pushing the idea of class subjectivity in Freire beyond its familiar determinants (namely as an ‘identity’), the paper resituates the notion of radical subjectivity in critical pedagogy as the effect of a traumatic loss or gap in the sociosymbolic order of being. The author argues that the ‘naming event’ in Freire is formally rooted in an encounter with this unconscious gap. To conclude, the paper offers critical educators some new points of departure for conceptualizing the transformative labor of problem-posing dialogue.

Keywords:

• Paulo Freire
• Lacanian theory
• critical pedagogy
• psychoanalysis
• dialogue
• problem-posing pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I refer here to Freire’s (2000) notable remark in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society… The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not ‘marginals,’ are not people living ‘outside’ society. They have always been ‘inside’—inside the structure which made them ‘beings for others’” (p. 74).

2 This section builds on an argument advanced in a previously published article (see Armonda, 2022).

3 For Zupančič (2017), a word with consequences is a “word that gives us access to reality in a whole different way… [it] reveals a hitherto invisible dimension of social reality, and gives us tools to think it” (p. 139).

4 Freire (2001) later provides another clue to what he means by “cunning,” referring to it as a form of “unconscious connivance” with the dominant social order (p. 78).

5 Or, “as Freud put it succinctly, psychoanalysis would only be possible in the condition where it would no longer be needed” (Žižek, 2022, p. 127). Similarly, if critical pedagogy were possible, we would no longer be living in a world defined by oppression.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex J. Armonda

Alex J. Armonda, Ph.D., currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Texas at Austin. His research examines the tradition of critical pedagogical thought through psychoanalytic and poststructural lenses. Alex received the 2021 Taylor & Francis Past Presidents’ Award for Outstanding Graduate Research from the American Educational Studies Association. His work on Paulo Freire and Jacques Lacan has been published in Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, with another article on the dialectics of critical pedagogy forthcoming in Educational Theory. His writing has appeared in other notable outlets and collections, including The Oxford Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies and The Routledge Handbook to Critical Approaches to Politics and Policy of Education.