School, Desire, Law

Abstract

In 1961, a new school pedagogy was founded in France called "Institutional Pedagogy". It stands in the tradition of Freinet pedagogy, but also opened up to the influences of institutional psychotherapy in psychiatry and social psychology. The founder, Fernand Oury, a teacher in a suburb of Paris, published a book with the Venezuelan psychologist Aïda Vasquez in 1967 in which the new procedures in the classroom of a school class are presented. The pupils work and learn in small teams. They discuss their cooperation or the conflicts they experience in their neighbourhood in meetings provided for this purpose. Oury's pedagogy became a model for many teachers. They meet in working groups in which the problems and developments of individual pupils are presented, analysed under the guidance of a psychoanalyst and sometimes published as case studies, so-called monographs. One of these psychoanalytically trained supervisors, who subjects such monographs to a thorough analysis in several books, referring to Lacan's psychoanalysis, is Francis Imbert. His work is to be honored in this article.