Pedagogical Desire: Authority, Seduction, Transference, and the Question of Ethics

The importance of a pedagogy informed by the tenets of psychoanalysis is the theme of this collection of essays. What is the right pedagogical distance for learning to take place? What should be the teacher’s role concerning a student’s desire? Ethically speaking, how are we to understand the dialectic between desire and the drive? Are we obligated to help students mourn the knowledge that they must let go? Can ignorance (which sounds pejorative) be pedagogically useful–as that which is unsaid and repressed? When the pedagogical distance collapses and seduction takes place, can such behavior be excused? These are just some of the questions that are raised throughout this collection by the authors. Lacanian psychoanalysis presents a challenge to our usual understanding of the subject as formulated by ego psychology, as well as the discursive subject of postmodernism. Can Lacan’s tripartite psychic registers of the Real, Imaginary, and the Symbolic present the subject in unending intrapsychic conflict? Can pedagogy address this struggle? How do we, as educators, take the notion of the unconscious seriously into account? The authors of this collection engage themselves in such questioning, in some cases examining their own practices and in other cases developing possible strategies with a view of understanding the psychic life of teaching.