Freire and Lacan: Critical pedagogy as a radical methodology of the subject

Abstract

Turning to key texts of Paulo Freire and Jacques Lacan, this paper argues that the experience organized in critical pedagogy can be rearticulated on the basis of a structural-practical connection to psychoanalysis. I pay specific attention to the methodical parallels that develop between the accounts of the psychoanalytic and pedagogical encounters in Lacan and Freire, arguing that critical pedagogy can be presented in a way that embraces the Lacanian theories of subjectivity and the unconscious, while affirming its political and emancipatory commitments. This theoretical analysis unfolds in two parts. First, I develop an account of Lacan that can militate for the critical pedagogical intervention, offering a grammar for elaborating upon Freire’s claim that critical pedagogy be understood as kind of psychoanalysis. Bringing into focus a more practically oriented Lacan, I demonstrate how his work offers a rationality for organizing an intervention in the terrain of subjectivity. Second, I apply this reading of Lacan to the pedagogical experience defined by Freire in an effort to articulate in a new key the problems and possibilities structuring his intervention, linking the question of educational praxis to traumatic/unconscious knowledge as the site of operation for facilitating the political subjectivation of students.

Keywords:

• Critical pedagogy
• psychoanalysis
• subjectivity
• Paulo Freire
• Jacques Lacan
• Slavoj Zizek

Acknowledgments

A special thank you to Noah De Lissovoy for serving as advisor through the multiple drafts of this paper.

Notes

1 For an example of Lacan’s critique of psychoanalytic treatment as a “reduction” of the individual’s “deviation from reality,” see The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power (Lacan, 2006, p. 493).

2 For a succinct discussion on the three phases in Lacan’s thought on the end of the psychoanalytic process, see Slavoj Žižek’s Lacan—at what point is he Hegelian? (Žižek, 2005, pp. 14–17); and the three phases in Lacan’s conceptualization of the Other, see Žižek’s Connections of the Freudian field to philosophy (Žižek, 2005, p. 42). For a brief overview on Lacan’s three orders (symbolic, imaginary, real) from a dialectical-historical perspective, see Fredric Jameson’s The Three Names of the Dialectic (Jameson, 2009, pp. 23–24).

3 This is a position Freire (2016b) maintained through his final writings: “Literacy education in a destitute area… can only make sense on a human level if it comes also with a sort of historical-political-social psychoanalysis, from which a gradual purging of undue guilt results. That amounts to an ‘expulsion’ of the oppressor from ‘within’ the oppressed, as the invading shadow the former is. Once that shadow is expelled… it must be replaced with self-autonomy and self-responsibility” (p. 66).

4 Žižek defines the stance of radical desire more specifically as a radicalization of loss: radical desire names nothing other than the “experience of loss as a ‘positive,’ indeed ‘productive’ condition” (2005, p. 28).

5 This dynamic is most clearly exemplified in Freire’s (2014) firsthand accounts of his teaching experience. For example, when working with a group of students in New York, Freire discusses that when students were decoding images of their city, they insisted the snapshots came from an ‘impoverished nation’ somewhere far away from the United States (p. 45). Freire’s description shows how the ideological supplement emerges to ‘cover over’ the gap/inconsistency opened up by the image: in this case, the fantasmatic belief that these disasters (like poverty) are peripheral, not central and constitutive, to the symbolic universe (Other) of capitalism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex J. Armonda

Alex J. Armonda is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Cultural Studies in Education program at the University of Texas at Austin. His research examines the tradition of critical pedagogical thought in education through psychoanalytic, decolonial, and critical theoretical lenses.