Education, psychoanalysis and conflict: interconnections by Institutional Pedagogy – interview with Bruno Robbes

Abstract

Institutional Pedagogy is an educational proposal originated within the Freinet Movement in the late 1950s, which is anchored in psychoanalysis, taking the unconscious as a factor to be considered in important determinations of schooling processes, among which is the management of relational conflicts. Assuming the psychic conflict of desires and drives with cultural limits as motivation for learning, that pedagogy associates violence to the death drive, and understands the educational process as humanization within a culture that, at the same time, must regulate the deadly drives and value the vital ones, both inherent to the impulsive psychic life. It then is presented as a pedagogy of conflicts. Interpretating Freinet’s techinques and attentive to group processes, it develops some of its own devices (also called institutions), aiming at the development of verbal expression of thoughts and feelings, with the regulation of laws, places and limits that organize the pedagogical daily life and mediate horizontal and vertical relationships, in the classroom and at school taken as collectives, in the psychological and political sense of the term. Bruno Robbes, French pedagogue and professor at Cergy Paris University, is an expert in this current and, in this interview, deals with topics such as educational authority, the future of teaching as a profession, conflict management and the stress of education professionals related to that task, considering these themes from the interlocution between education and psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on the Lacanian perspective in which that Pedagogy is rooted.