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

• Published in: The Review of education/pedagogy/cultural studies Vol. 44; no. 2; pp. 121 - 146
• Main Author: Armonda, Alex J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 15.03.2022; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Correlation; Critical pedagogy; Critical Theory; Educational Philosophy; Grammar; Intervention; Jacques Lacan; Paulo Freire; Pedagogy; Political Influences; Psychiatry; Psychoanalysis; Rationality; Slavoj Zizek; Subjectivity; Teaching; Teaching Methods; Trauma; Unconsciousness
• ISSN: 1071-4413; 1556-3022
• DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2021.2007206

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.