More about Psychoanalysis

Furthermore, it is crucial for future teachers to try to decode complex behavior of children and adolescents, which is often difficult to understand at first glance, as an expression of unresolved development-specific unconscious desires and conflicts. This is a prerequisite for reaching "difficult children and adolescents" or those growing up in crises with the educational program instead of stigmatizing them or even excluding them from learning communities. The individual, understanding view of psychoanalysis on individual children and their (traumatic) life history has complemented and enriched subject-sensitive pedagogy (Ariane Garlichs) in a fruitful way over decades. The Kassel Pupil Support Project, supported by educational scientists and psychoanalysts, has become a national and international model project and, together with the study program "Conflict Counseling for Educators", has helped generations of future teachers to achieve a specific professionalism in dealing with challenging pedagogical situations.

The roots of the inclusion of psychoanalysis in teacher education were laid 50 years ago. The psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich was one of the first to call for a new understanding of education in Germany after the war and National Socialism and, together with the then Hessian Minister of Education, Ludwig von Friedeburg, recognized that teacher training courses at the newly founded Comprehensive University in Kassel (GhK) could play a central role in this. An "education after Auschwitz" (Adorno) was unthinkable without a knowledge of the dark, unconscious sides of man and their entanglements, seductions and dangers. The original three professorships for psychoanalysis in teacher training were expected to contribute to an interdisciplinary dialogue with educationalists, philosophers and theologians in order to recognize the shadows of the (National Socialist) past on educational processes in Germany and to counteract them together. In lecture series and joint research projects at FB 01, this common concern was pursued in an interdisciplinary way.

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This text is the result of a machine translation and serves only as a working aid. No responsibility is accepted for any inaccuracies or translation errors. The German version is in any case legally binding.