Desiring development? Psychoanalytic contributions to antidevelopmental psychology

Abstract

This paper explores how psychoanalytic ideas might support a project of critiquing the developmental paradigm as it influences, and links, models of economic and individual development on which educational policy and practice rely. After outlining the conceptual domain and questions at issue, the paper rereads some key claims about Enlightenment and its relationship with representations of immaturity as inviting scope for reinterpreting contemporary intensifications of developmentalism. This provides some further rationale and focus for the turn to psychoanalysis as a critical conceptual and methodological resource (although with some key qualifications). Ideas drawn from feminist and postcolonial engagements with psychoanalysis are used to inform discussion of two indicative texts about childhood, drawing on contemporary Lacanian interpretations that are applied to address the problematic of childhood, before finishing with some speculations on alternative modes of engagement with Enlightenment and developmental approaches.

Keywords:

• Enlightenment
• childhood
• humanism
• modernity
• postcolonial
• Lacan

Notes

1. Interestingly the successor term to ‘reconstructing’ was ‘refocusing’, which indicates an acknowledgement of a less fundamental shift, e.g. Jones and Frederickson (1990).

2. It is beyond the scope of this paper to elaborate the implications of this point for the status and evaluation of Foucault’s works but see also Allen (2009) for a sympathetic but critical reading highlighting inadvertent convergences between Foucault’s genealogy and evolutionary approaches.

3. This crudely glosses over some key subtleties of argument and differences of interpretation for the purposes of my account here, but the key point is that she made a choice to do what she felt was right, knowing the dire personal consequences this would set in motion.

4. For reasons that should become clear, my discussion here goes beyond my earlier treatment of this text (Burman 2008a, 2010).

5. NSPCC is the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

6. This is indicated by both its website and the geographical location of the office, in the heart of the Pakistani community in Manchester.