Adolescents, Teachers, and Psychoanalysts: a clinical political intervention

Abstract

What do psychoanalysts do in schools? This article discusses a clinical-political psychoanalytic intervention at school that interpellates teenagers and the teaching staff into constituting and sharing their knowledge. During the intervention, three moments are distinguished at which we could assert the suffering of adolescents when the school’s functions are cross-cut by race and class, a crossing mimicked in the correlation among development, poverty, race, and social danger. When knowledge could be shared through dialogue, the school’s conflicts and discomfort vis-à-vis adolescence and the complexities of the Brazilian historical-social situation could be located, thereby highlighting the establishment of conflicts as engines of work rather than as failure of the teaching staff.