Introduction

Currently, there is no place for any doubts about the status that childhood acquired about a hundred years ago. Since approximately the twenties of the 20th century, the recognition of childhood as such would have finally been achieved. Consequently, children’s existence in their most absolute specificity was admitted as never before. In other words, the so-called historical invisibility of childhood would have given way a century ago to resplendent visibility (Voltolini, 2021, p. 418). Moreover, having definitively left behind the alleged non-subject condition, the infants began to enjoy the universal subject condition fully. In short, and as the author rightly points out: “Certainly, children have always existed; but now they have a political status: childhood. This political childhood emancipation should deserve to be parsimoniously analyzed […]” (Voltolini, 2021, p. 418).

Along those lines, the so-called political emancipation of children coincided with what would have been the scientific and psychological deciphering of the childhood essence in the first decades of the last century. In other words, the higher childhood (Gallo & Limongelli, 2021) - supposedly emancipated from adults - would have been driven by the psychological unveiling of the so-called universal nature of the child. Thanks to this, the child itself or the universal child – and no longer the miniature adult of yesteryear – has become the center of all education. Thus, it was approximately since the second decade of the twentieth century that, for example, the school device was centered on the so-called universal child, that is, on The autonomous child. And through such a focus, the child minority began to be freed from the adult majority on behalf of the full self-realization of the newly emancipated children[2] .

Now, as is well known, Pedagogy was primarily the field of study entrusted with the responsibility of consolidating this ideal and even total image of The Autonomous child. Using knowledge from specific scientific fields such as Educational Psychology, Educational Sociology, etc. – the so-called Educational Sciences –, Pedagogy intended to be able to represent the child as a whole thanks to the fusion of such specific knowledge, which would allow it to intervene more effectively on this object so targeted and precious (Voltolini, 2021). However, when faced with the mirage of childhood itself - of childhood in its totality, universality, objectivity and independence - Pedagogy, colonized as never before by psycho-scientificism, was left to make this universal child the very center of the educational universe. Then, it is evident that, in school terms, this implied making the student and his learning as central as the teacher and his teaching would become marginal. Thus, if the child came to occupy the center of the school scene, or in other words, if he became the protagonist of such a scene, the teacher had the place of mere supporting (namely: the place of facilitator, animator, tutor, etc.). Or, in more contemporary terms, if the student was thus empowered within the school device, the teacher was fundamentally deauthorized, delegitimized and discredited, and this was because teaching has been unduly associated with the oppression and persecution of students exercise - conceived there as necessary and not as contingent – to which would still be added the named magistral presumption or arrogance in academic-institutional terms, besides the alleged conveyance to students of allegedly dead, petrified, obsolete and useless knowledge. By the way, it is probably based on this kind of caricature that the cliché has spread saying that school would be a nineteenth-century institution; the teacher, a twentieth-century professional; and the student, a twenty-first-century creature. Evidently, what a commonplace like this ends up conveying is the conception that the correctly updated teacher would be the one who would eclipse himself from the start - thus renouncing the teaching authority – then make his educational intervention allegedly adequate (that is complementary) to the called psychology of student reality (Lajonquière, 1999), and which would finally place the student at the center of a school device taken as innovative.

Well then, it is precisely in view of such profound mutations around the notion of childhood, which have been hegemonizing since the twenties of the previous century, that this article, theoretically based on the Psychoanalysis and Education fields, proposes to analyze some effects of the children pseudo-emancipation that particularly impacted on the school and the relationship - or rather, on the transferential bond - between teachers and students. In this sense, we seek to conduct a theoretical and bibliographic investigation, that is, a reflective inquiry based on texts and sources. Then, the theoretical-conceptual perspective of the Psychoanalysis and Education fields will be particularly important insofar as it allows sustaining the conception that effective students’ emancipation has no place at school without, by transference[3] via, first immersing them in the adults’ world to identify with some among the latter, particularly with certain teachers. After all, such identification with specific masters is even the condition of possibility for students later arise subjectively singularized - that is, so that they can later disidentify themselves from their masters in the name of establishing a special relationship with the epistemic, ethical or aesthetic traditions conveyed in and by the school. Furthermore, during the intergenerational transmission of culture, such identification and disidentification can produce their most beneficial effects in formative terms (Batista, 2022).

Given this, what is intended to be exposed here is fundamentally the thesis that the emancipation or separation of students presupposes - as opposed to repelling - an identification or alienation to teachers and, therefore, to the cultural and symbolic traits they convey in the school. And such identification, in turn, operates in the school environment from the transference field unconsciously sustained by a student in the face of a specific teacher. In short: it is by no means without the other teacher, much less without the big Other (the symbolic language), that the possibility always unsecured a priori of the students’ emancipation may eventually occur in school life.

Traits transmission or via di porre procedure

Based on what was briefly exposed above, perhaps some elements are already available to legitimize the argument that, when the teacher manages the pedagogical discourse centered on The child - a discourse which, besides having started to spread a hundred years ago, is made up of scientificist traits of a psi content -, such a teacher marginalizes himself, assumes a secondary role and disallows himself in front of his students, the school and education in a more general way. By managing this psychologized discourse, the teacher resigns from the educational act (Lajonquière, 1999). In other words, under the effect of the pedagogical discourse centered on The child, the teacher is unaware of a kind of teaching self-exclusion, which tends to be more invisible than the various modalities of exclusion that affect the students. In fact, because of the psychologizing centering of the school device on learners - centering that is the analysis object par excellence of this reflection -, the adult world’s attention to student exclusion tends to be much more significant and more effective than the attention to the exclusion that affects teachers themselves. The reason is that when we think of school exclusion, it rarely refers to the teaching position within a device that, having centered on the student and their individual psychology, has pushed school cultural transmission into the shadows (Blais et al., 2014, p. 105). In this regard, and as observed by Blais et al., the intergenerational transmission of culture is structural and, strictly speaking, cannot fail to occur (which means that the social bond is simply unfeasible without such transmission). However, and even though it is “irreducibly first” (Blais et al., 2014, p. 104), such intergenerational transmission of culture may indeed suffer degradation of its symbolic effectiveness due to historical or discursive contingencies. And such is the case, for example, of what happens when the pedagogical discourse that is hegemonic in a specific historical context impels students, as much as possible, to learn for themselves, that is, to learn individually and preferably “in practice” (which is to the detriment of the learning that emerges from and in the transferential bond with the teacher). This is precisely the case of the pedagogical discourse centered on The Autonomous Child, as Arendt has demonstrated. In the school whose center is The student, the teacher has to give up his teaching to merely demonstrate how knowledge is produced (Arendt, 2005, pp. 229-234) and so that the student can thereby supposedly make knowledge by himself; in other words, the student can learn by himself and not from what the teacher teaches.

The pedagogical discourse centered on The child, which already enjoys a century-old hegemony in the scope of school education, then launches the teacher, who promotes such discourse, to renounce the educational act, as stated. This discourse has the power to make teachers renounce, which in Psychoanalysis has since Freud been called the via di porre procedure, an expression taken by the psychoanalyst from Leonardo da Vinci’s work (Freud, 2016, pp. 336-337).

However, the work per via di porre is proper to the painter’s craft and consists essentially in adding traits to a given surface, as occurs in the case of the paint pigments deposited on a wall, on a canvas, etc. In school terms, the via di porre work is such that it enables the transmission - by the teacher to the students - of symbolic or identifying features, which are fundamentally conveyed unconsciously[4]. In this way, such transmission of traits or marks operates on the opposite side of what is deliberately taught by a teacher. The transmission of symbolic traits is negative to teaching the content itself (Lajonquière, 1999). Therefore, such transmission is latent while the teaching is always manifest. In this sense, and using exclusively metaphorical terms, teaching and transmission are like two sides of the same coin. Or, in more rigorous terms, transmission and teaching make up the very same band of Moebius, which means that there is no relation of exteriority and interiority between them, but instead extimity, i.e., intimate exteriority[5] . That is why teaching and transmission are mutually presupposed. Hence, transmission and teaching in no way overlap each other, and this is because each has its own effectiveness and legality (Lajonquière, 1999).

In the wake of this, if teaching is to ensign (to put a sign, make traits) and, if it is a question of consciously putting either letters, or mathematics, or the laws of physics and chemistry, etc. into signs, as far as transmission is concerned, it is more a matter of unconsciously placing those in signifiers. And if precisely, it is the case that the ensign excludes the subject who teaches from the scene in the same way that the biunivocity proper to the sign - that is, proper to the signified (concept) and to the signifier (acoustic image) that composes it - is given in advance, regarding the psychoanalytic perspective about the signifier, the priority falls on the chain (of signifiers) itself as well as on the effect of the signified that such chain disruptively arouses. So, the priority of the signifiers articulated among themselves - that is, from the symbolic chain - over the binary-imaginary sign (that means, the mentioned biunivocity between signified and signifier) opens a gap for the teaching subject to enter there with his interpretation, which becomes possible while the signifiers, once combined and recombined among themselves, subvert the mentioned sign biunivocity, thus raising the misunderstanding or polysemy that are inherent to symbolic language[6]. Therefore, if the student passively receives marks that, in principle, are transmitted by the other (the teacher) and who is unconsciously subjected to the Other (to the symbolic, plurivocal language), the very same student, in the après-coup, actively positions himself in relation to these marks, and which puts into operation a kind of dialectization - primarily unconscious, once again - between passivity and activity that implies a symbolic appropriation – it means, a plurivocal, polysemic acquisition – by the student. It is, in short, the subjectivation of what has been transmitted to him.

This dialectization (without synthesis) between activity and passivity echoes Bondía’s (2002) reasoning regarding the notion and the subject of experience.

Experience, according to the author, does not merely concern something that occurs or happens objectively, but rather what occurs or happens for someone; it is not only what arrives factually, but instead, what reaches us, that is, what arrives for one or more subjects Thus, the subject of experience is a kind of space in which takes place what occurs or happens. He is a point of arrival for everything that arrives to him; he is a “territory of passage” in which what happens “inscribes some marks, leaves some signs” (Bondía, 2002, p. 24). However, the subject is “like a place that receives what arrives and gives place to it” (Bondía, 2002, p. 24). By giving way to the traits that come to him, the subject then positions himself about them, and he does not allow himself to be reduced to an object of this addition of traits. It happens in the case of the subject of learning, who must be either available or open or susceptible to what comes to him from the other teacher (and, in this sense, coming from the Other who unconsciously subjects this other). Because if it is not like that, the conditions for the school experience to happen to the student become very unlikely, precisely because someone must lose powers to have an experience (Bondía, 2002, p. 25). Therefore, the empowered, central and always active student is thus placed in a very unfavorable position so that the via di porre work by the teacher will have symbolic, formative and subjectivizing effects on the student. Under such conditions, the student’s narcissism shields him as much as possible from facing the possibility of having a school experience in which the alterity that is proper to symbolic traits, that is, to the traits of the Other, is truly at stake. By the way, such symbolic alterity is so fruitful that not only the student, but the teacher himself, can learn while ensigns, and this is because the subversion of signs by the signifier chain is such that the teacher is given to be surprised by his speech (or with the speech of the students). So, learning implies being surprised by certain misunderstandings that saying provokes in the face of what has already been said, what has been instituted, what has been accomplished, etc. In the same direction, Giuliano (2020, p. 138, our translation) reminds us that the teacher who “is situated at the heart of the impossible can bear – in the sense of supporting – a betrayal as a translation or as a transgression to which its teaching can invite”. The teacher referred to this impossible conveys the transgression possibility of his teaching by the students.

Transference: teaching power and student identification

As briefly noted above, via di porre work presupposes transference from the student to the teacher. During this phenomenon, the student unconsciously takes this or that teacher as a phantasmatic successor to the early childhood parents. More specifically, it can be stated that, in transference, the student unintentionally puts the teacher in the place of the Ego-Ideal. And according to Millot (1992, p. 128), the Ego-Ideal,

[…] is the product of the primitive identification with the father (or who fulfills his role for the child), which is reinforced in the Oedipus complex. This identification constitutes the nucleus, which will be enriched by later identifications, for people who are led to occupy this place of the Ego-Ideal, such as teachers and educators.

About the Ego-Ideal and its genesis, it is essential to emphasize that such a psychic instance, being symbolic, is distinguished from the ideal-Ego, which is imaginary, as well as that the former is for the recombination of the signifier chain just as the latter is for the closed biunivocity of the sign (Lajonquière, 1993, p. 239). That is if, regarding the subjectivation of a child, the prototype of his Ego is formed as such child is biunivocally alienated to the image of the ideal child that the maternal Other conveys, and what inscribes the ideal-Ego in the psyche of that child. On the other hand, the subsequent rupture with this ideal image will depend on the symbolic interpellation of the paternal Other, who, by representing the Law of interdiction to incest (that is, the Law of symbolic language), will thus provide the inscription of the Ego-ideal in the infantile psyche. In other words, it is only in the face of this symbolic inscription that the child will stop taking the image of himself as the ideal, which then allows her to start to pursue an ideal whose stuffing is made up of words and language. Hence, an ideal is structurally elusive since it is abstract, polysemic, plurivocal, etc. Well then, as the Ego-ideal belongs to the order of the unattainable, it causes the subject the wish to continue desiring, which allows this subject, for example, to enjoy particular objects of satisfaction without ceasing to desire (for example, to continue sliding through the signifiers chain to produce the jouissance of ultimate meaning. Still a meaning that never comes and cannot come precisely because it is of the order of the impossible). It is thus a matter of jouissance, but not without desire[7].

It is to the extent that in transference, the student unconsciously puts the teacher in the place of the Ego-ideal, resulting in having a power of suggestion over the student. And this power of suggestion, in turn, is what gives symbolic effectiveness to traits transmission. The transferential suggestion provides pregnancy to the via di porre procedure. However, by managing the pedagogical discourse centered on The child, the teacher abdicates such power over the student under the illusion that the student would thus be emancipated. In the face of this, the teacher gives up an ethical exercise of power in favor of the student’s empowerment so that the student becomes the protagonist of the school scene. However, as Corso and Corso (1997) point out, the problem nested therein is precisely that, in this way, teachers renounce their place of “possible identification models” (Corso & Corso, 1997, p. 91) for their students. That is, under the impetus that the pedagogical discourse centered on The child provides, the teacher finds himself amid great difficulties to remain in the students’ “propitious place to the identifications” (Corso & Corso, 1997, p. 92). And if in a scenario like this, the students’ identification with teachers does not become entirely impracticable; on the other hand, it becomes a fact that is not easy to happen. Thereby, such teaching resignation makes it psychically more costly for learners to identify with symbolic ideals (from the Other) and with public ideals that are or should be conveyed by teachers at school. In other words, such a scenario intensifies the vicissitudes inherent to the addition of traits in the student’s Ego-ideal. In short, what is at issue is a kind of desymbolization of the students’ psyche due to the pregnancy and hegemony of a pedagogical discourse that, intending to emancipate them precociously, delivers them from the start to a kind of symbolic orphanhood. As Millot (1992, p. 128) asserts:

[…] the educational process […] requires the educator to take the place of the Ego-Ideal so that the learner submits to his demands and, on the other hand, the learner’s Ego-Ideal, by the absorption of certain educator traits, suffers his influence.

Regarding such symbolic orphanhood and the impoverishment in the addition of traits in the students' Ego-ideal because of the difficulty to identify themselves with their teachers, it may be opportune to bring up here a hypothesis concerning the recurring cases of young people - or possibly even children - who self-harm them, that is, who make bodily marks such as scars, cuts, scarifications, etc. It is worth asking here if these young people or even children were not, through this, unconsciously denouncing the hegemonic adult renunciation of education (a renunciation that had its discursive and, above all, institutional genesis, as stated, around the twenties of the last century, and which would also come to intensify significantly in our neoliberal times). Would not those denounce the prevalent renunciation by the adults in placing themselves in a more favorable position for acquiring identifying traits by the younger ones? After all, it is to the extent that adults abdicate the transmission of symbolic marks in education in favor of children and young people's early emancipation, ending up forcing the younger ones to be free (Millot, 1992, 149), as if children and young people could or should make themselves as if they were self-made men, self-made women. Millot also shrewdly observes that forcing children and young people to emancipate themselves from adults as soon as possible, as if they could or should self-engender, corresponds exactly to forcing them to desire (Millot, 1992, 149). Although obviously, the obligatoriness of desire can only condemn them to exclusion. In this sense, children and young people would then be denouncing with their marks in the real of the flesh that the vicissitudes inherent to the symbolic access to desire have been intensified by an educational imaginary whose origin, as proposed here, is centenary. Yet, it should also be stressed that, under this hypothesis, it is not intended to underestimate the variety and complexity of the causes at stake when a young person self-harm. Perhaps such a hypothesis operates as a widespread background nowadays, but that does not exclude etiological specificities that are difficult to understand in their concreteness. As Blais et al. (2014, p. 83) stated, “the fewer adults transmit, the more children submit themselves to the tyranny of the group”. Or even more, with the decline of transmission (Batista, 2012), children are subjected, perhaps as never before, to the market imperatives, primarily in the ultraliberalism context (Dufour, 2005), which co-opted with extraordinary ease, in “educational” terms, the scientistic, psychologized and naturalized ideas of the school centered on The emancipated child. Incidentally, such co-option constitutes a line of continuity of this research, in the sense that the school centered on The child seems to have anticipated the pragmatic and individualistic rationality (Arendt, 2005) organized around the performance, competencies and productivism principles (Giuliano, 2020, p. 131), in recent decades, which culminated in the total capitalism school, which is marked by managerial furor and the (com)pulsion to assess (Giuliano, 2020, p. 127).

Now, apart from the fact that children’s pseudo-emancipation positions them as if they, in short, were miniature adults (Arendt, 2005, p. 237), since they are obliged to make decisions for themselves as if they were already ready for public life, on the other hand, teachers, by renouncing to educate, also reveal the fact that they no longer want to interfere in the students’ processes. That is, everything happens as if teachers were no longer capable of desiring anything else on behalf of their students. Or, in short, it is as if the teachers were keen that the students should decide for themselves as soon as possible. Now, from such a framework, it is inevitable to infer that what - especially unconsciously - the adult postulates is a kind of neutrality, which is by no means of the same content as the supposed neutrality of the technicist paradigm of education. In the context in question, it is a pseudo-neutrality coming from a field of educational and pedagogical concepts understood as progressive. However, as Millot (1992, p. 152) well reminds us about this issue, such a postulate is nonsense insofar as parents and teachers are not – nor they can be – neutral in education since they are fundamental in the constitution and densification (addition of traits) of children Ego-ideal in the family environment and of students in the school environment. Somehow, everything happens then as if the parents and teachers traversed by the discourse centered on The child were confusing themselves with analysts, as Millot rightly observes. In the end:

[…] if in transference, the analyst occupies the place of the Ego-ideal, he must play himself dead (here is one of the aspects of what is called the analyst’s neutrality); unlike the educator, he should not make any demands from this place to not to block the psychoanalytic process. (Millot, 1992, p. 132)

But in education, it should not be like that - nor it is like that - because in such a context, one “operates by modeling the Ego-ideal from the provision of identifying traits” (Millot, 1992, p. 130), which excludes the possibility of parents and teachers playing themselves dead, not influencing their children or their students' “processes”, an abstention that parents and teachers suppose they can sustain in favor of the alleged autonomy and emancipation of the youngers, that is, in favor of a higher childhood (Gallo & Limongelli, 2021).

Final considerations

If the via di porre procedure is, after all, characteristic of the painter’s craft and, on the other hand, also of the teacher, the via di levare procedure is characteristic of the sculptor’s craft and, also, of the analyst (Freud, 2016, pp. 336-337). And while the deposit or addition of traits defines the first, the second is determined by their suppression, like the traits that must be removed from marble, wood, etc., by the sculptor so that a sculpture can come into the world. Well, as Millot (1992) clearly explains, while in school education, certain public, social, etc. ideals are inevitably at issue to which the students should initially alienate themselves through the teachers' interventions as well as the students' transference to such teachers, in the case of analysis there is no way of proposing any ideals to which the analysand should alienate himself and which would be conveyed by the analyst on duty. Or in terms of Mannoni (1977, p. 45, our emphasis): “The analytic situation is asocial, but pedagogy, in turn, is obliged to define itself concerning a given society; all pedagogy depends on an ideological or political choice”. In this sense, the analyst does not make use of transference to evoke the identification of the analysand with a specific ideal; on the contrary, the analyst performs as the sculptor, which then allows him to suppress traits that the analysand has been previously alienated throughout his education and during his life in the adult world (experiences that necessarily neurotized him, it is worth adding). Indeed, as discussed above, based on Bondía (2002), the analyst acts as a sculptor so that the analysand may, as he desires, have the experience of suppressing certain traits to which he has been alienated. This experience cannot occur outside analysis and, therefore, without the sculptor-analyst. In any case, what is involved here is the suspension of the analysand’s repression, as opposed to the consummation of the drives’ repression in the name of the possibility of life in civilization, that is, of the existence of an ordinary world or the public sphere, etc. In short, the suppression of traits accomplished by the analyst and the analysand raises the possibility that psychic separation – or disidentification – can occur, and, thus, the analysand can, using analysis, face the emergence of the unconscious desire that inhabits him (a desire which, as stated, was repressed precisely in the name of the possibility of the social bond existence, i.e., life in common in civilization).

According to Millot, education and analysis are mutually and radically opposed since the former intends - or one day intended - to add traits in students (which necessarily neurotizes them). In contrast, the second wants to suppress them in the analysands (in the name of their deneurotization). For the author, there is no possibility of dialectization (even without synthesis, it is worth noting) between analysis and education. However, perhaps things are not so watertight in this regard, even if one should by no means intend to merge psychoanalysis and education since such an incestuous relationship would inevitably destroy both at once. Taking due care to recognize the mutual irreducibility of these different fields and their fundamental modes – but perhaps not so exclusive, as will be seen –of operation (addition or suppression of traits), on the other hand, one can glimpse certain bonds between them. And so, something like classic parallelism between Psychoanalysis and Education is not proposed here. And this is so much so that, with Mannoni (1977, p. 47), one may even suggest that there would be in education something of via di levare work (which is inherent to analysis), “Rousseau’s method has points in common with the analytical method, insofar as it is revealed in him [in Rousseau] a desire for suppression, for retraction [by the teacher]”. After all, the teacher also suppresses himself at a certain point in his transmission and teaching (without implying to neglect one or the other). That is, the teacher, at a given moment in the education of his students, withdraws and eclipses himself – even if he does not do it from the start, as the defenders of the early pseudo-emancipation of children propose. And by suppressing himself at a certain point, the teacher envisions unconsciously giving rise to the emergence of the subject of desire in the student. The teacher aims at disidentification or the students' subjective appropriation regarding traits, knowledge, public values, aesthetic values, etc., transmitted at school. In this way, the identification of students with certain teachers is usually followed by a disidentification that prompts the former to conduct a stricto sensu of educational experience in which such students, as subjects of learning, give way to what comes to them from the teachers and the school. Furthermore, under such a dialectic without synthesis - which could be called (de)identification - the student is not abandoned to a kind of existential vacuum or an anguished drift, as in principle occurs when he is left to himself under the presupposition that they should be treated as if they were, in fact, an adult or citizen already formed (Arendt, 2005, p. 237).

It is essential, in any case, to reiterate here the idea that such a teaching eclipse is in no way confused with the renunciation of education inherent in the pedagogical discourse centered on The child. In the same way, the dialectic of (dis)identification mentioned above by students is the antipode of the natural development conception that has become hegemonic in pedagogy for a hundred years. According to such a conception, there would be a supposed infantile essence or a universal nature of children that would be encysted in a potential state in the infants' organism and waiting for updating through stimuli said to be naturally adequate to this innate maturational capacity (Lajonquière, 1993). On the contrary, the (dis)identification by the students is a linguistic performance that arouses the advent of the "variety of the truth in children" (Voltolini, 2021, p. 218), which means that it reveals the reality of the plurality of them, as opposed to blossoming - under scientific and psychologized assumptions - the pseudo-universal of The child herself and autonomous[8]. Finally, the teaching eclipse referred to here has nothing with the marginalization of the teacher in the school device centered on The student, as well as it does not attribute a supporting role to the teacher, nor does it disallow the latter. On the contrary, the a posteriori teacher eclipse enables the student to murder his teacher symbolically (but this only happens after the teacher has given rise to the symbolic effects of adding - and then suppressing, why not? - of traits in the student). As stated, such addition and suppression of traits remove the present perspective from parallelism between Psychoanalysis and Education, thus giving room to an interface between the fields.

Such suppression of traits in the educational field has something in common with the suppression that an analysis envisions, which is why Freud, in his work, as Millot reminds us, implied that:

[…] a finished education, that is, a successful one, should allow overcoming the subject’s dependence on parental figures. The educator - and the analyst - should aim, by resolution of the Oedipus complex, at his dilution as an ideal figure. (Millot, 1992, p. 132)

This does not mean that transference can be - when it comes from the teacher eclipse - “fully” dissolved as it occurs in the analytical setting (besides the fact that such analytical dissolution of transference is not even intended by the teacher or by the school). This happens because the teacher, unlike the analyst, cannot renounce the power of suggestion that transference gives him (unless he also renounces education, as we have shown above). Meanwhile, the a posteriori teacher eclipse may collaborate to dissolve the student’s transference specifically with that same teacher (and not with others). On the one hand, this type of transference dissolution raises the emergence of the student’s desire (to know) in terms of a subjectivation of what was transmitted to him. On the other hand, at the same time, it enables new transferences for this student inside and outside the educational scope, thus offering more traits to be added to their Ego-ideal through the identifications that still will occur. In the case of analysis, as is well known, the suppressing marks procedure imposes on the analyst the renunciation of the power of suggestion provided by the transference (whose axis goes from the analysand to the analyst). Besides, through the crossing of the analysand’s phantom, the dissolution of the transference will occur, in the analysis, in a much stricter and even structural or “definitive” sense, an effect that in no way is - or should be - on the agenda for teachers, coordinators, school principals, etc. Or as Millot (1992, p. 132) asserts:

The analyst seeks his destitution from his patient’s Ego-ideal. The analysis of transference, corresponding to the resolution of the Oedipal complex, also undermines any possibility of further transference and releases the analysand from his infantile dependence on the instance of the Ego-ideal.

In this way, it may be possible to conclude, at least as far as it is possible to advance in this article, that, based mainly - but not exclusively - on identification with the teacher and, therefore, on the addition of traits in student's Ego-ideal, school education is then around, from a more structural point of view[9], with an identification not-whole from the students to the teachers. And so, education also collaborates in solving the oedipal complex of students when authorizing them, after all, to learn according to the desire that inhabits them - a desire that in this way elevates learning to apre(he)nding (Lajonquière, 1999), that is, what makes learning an experience (Bondía, 2002). Still, the school does not live by repression alone, although it cannot in any way renounce the repression of the students’ drives, above all in the name of ordinary life in the polis. However, to say that the school does not live by repression alone does not mean proposing that it properly suspends the students' repression, as it happens to the analysands in their analysis (deneurotization). Such a statement implies, before, that in the inevitable educational search for a possible path “between the Scylla of non-interference and the Charybdis of frustration” (Freud, 2010, p. 311), the Charybdis of frustration is to the repression in students just as the Scylla of non-interference is to for the possibility of the irruption of the desire into them. In other words, the Scylla of non-interference concerns the spontaneity of the unconscious formations, conceived there as the place of the Other in the human psyche and as the place of the psychic division that subjects us (conception which is not to be confused with that of the spontaneity of the so-called natural development of an infantile essence, which would inhabit the student understood there as an individual, that is, as an undivided).

Finally, perhaps it is also appropriate to add one more reflection here, even if very brief and given the air of the time: it is that, if in educational terms, the progressive field, as alluded to above, often finds itself dealing with the dismissal of the educational act by the teacher due to the prevailing renunciation of via di porre work (addition of traits in the student), a renunciation that the pedagogical discourse centered on The autonomous child implies, in turn, the field of contemporary reactionism, regarding education as well, finds itself with a renunciation modality that implies another sort of problematic consequences for education. This is the teacher’s renunciation of via di levare work (suppression of traits in the student). In this case, and as is well known, illusions are usually the most classic, typically orthopedic. For example, the defense of civic-military schools as well as the idea of a supposed return to the times of the teaching authority - in this case, refers to the exercise of the most severe autocracy - are both taken by the imaginary vote according to which there should never be limits to the identification of students to teachers and the ideals conveyed by the school. Now, such an imagination of education can only make the vicissitudes inherent to the advent of the subject of desire in students are also severely intensified (and even if such intensification occurs, in this case, in a different via and even opposite to the progressive one). It is, therefore, the refusal to disidentification and thanks to which the unpredictable, uncontrollable and always heterogeneous disruption of the subject of the unconscious may take place for students in school education. Well, in these terms, it is then a limit of this study - but also a line of future investigation - the fusion of Scylla and Charybdis “into a great beast that allows frustrating and frustrates to allow” (Giuliano, 2020, p. 128). It is because, sometimes, the via di porre renunciation in progressive education is only apparent, giving rise to fierce political proselytism by the adult (allowing frustration). And the via di levare renunciation by reactionism aims, at times, to promote a liberal and individualistic furor in students, including blaming them for the school's “failure” (frustrating to allow).

Though, and very distinctly from this, when what is intended in the education field is to be a shelter for the unsecured emergence of desire in students and teachers. Then, it is not the case to retreat either from the via di porre or the via di levare procedures. And this courage of adults subjectively involved with school education might thus correspond to the search for the aforementioned “path between the Scylla of non-interference and the Charybdis of frustration” (Freud, 2010, p. 311). This path is always uncertain and insecure and can only be traveled singularly. Finally, such a path, as an ethical axis par excellence in education, is the one that may come to release the teacher, in formative terms, both from pseudo-educational omission and oppression.

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[i] Doctor in Education, University of São Paulo (USP) (2013). Professor at USP.

[2] Since the beginnings of Modernity - starting with Juan Luis Vives, passing through Comenius and reaching Rousseau - the claim to identify the so-called immanent nature of childhood has been in question. However, in the 20th century, the psychologization placed such phantasmagoria - the universal child and, therefore, the alleged last word on childhood - at the center of the school.

[3] Grateful to transference that the student has unconsciously mistakenly taken the teacher (that is, a strange person) as a family member, that is, as a fanciful successor to the idealized early childhood parents, who supposedly enjoyed the power to fully safeguard the child in the face of helplessness.

[4] Traits are phonemes that constitute signifiers. After all, a phoneme is defined “by the distinctive [sound] traits that entertain with each of the other elements [phonemes]” (Dufour, 2005, p. 125). And as the heritage of a people is a “cumulative inheritance of traits” (Blais et al., 2014, p. 53), it cannot be transmitted or acquired intactly. Therefore, its transmission is subjectivizing.

[5] Even what is the most intimate to humans is, at the same time, outside us. In other words, the unconscious itself, as the place of the Other, is extimate to humans. That is, it is external and intimate at the same time. So, the opposition between interior and exterior does not account for the relationship between the subject of unconscious and the Other, nor the transmission by teaching.

[6] The sign biunivocity is subverted by the signifier chain. And so, a “cigar” is sometimes just a “cigar”, while other times, it is not. There is a biunivocity between “cigar” and “roll of tobacco leaves”. It is enough to articulate such a signifier to others, and misunderstandings occur: “This is not a cigar” - a statement which alludes to “This is not a pipe” by Magritte (1929).

[7] While the ideal-Ego concerns the imaginary illusion of the Ego around its supposed psychic indivisibility, the inscription of the Ego-ideal addresses the subject to the psychic division that is structural to him (symbolic castration), since from the unconscious recognition of the latter, the ego can never coincide with the ideal, and what, in this way, causes in the subject his desire.

[8] The psychoanalytic conception of the subject constitution of the unconscious implies that it does not develop naturally from a germinal reality, i.e., the conception of the subject constitution is the opposite of the conception - hegemonic in psychology and pedagogy - of the development of an interiority (essence) immanent to the individual (Lajonquière, 1993, pp. 150-162).

[9] When one thinks of historical contingencies (that is, in the hegemonic social discourse, meaning the social bond) and not in the language structure (Symbolic), what stands out is, as already mentioned, the increase in inherent vicissitudes to the identification from students to teachers in terms of the century hegemony of the pedagogical discourse centered on The child.