Beyond The Ignorant Schoolmaster : On Education, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This first chapter introduces the main concepts of Marxist sociology and Freudian psychoanalysis, two theories that have been intensely devoted to investigating and overcoming the epistemological effects caused by the phenomenal forms which inhered in the mode of production and the psychic apparatus, their respective subject matters. Their two prominent spearheads, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, soon understood that their scientific endeavors depended on deciphering the mechanisms which, in each case, generated these distorted reflections. These mechanisms were class division—the complex network that in any given social milieu consolidates around specific relations of production—and the splitting up of the psychic apparatus into conscious and unconscious regions, with repression acting as a wall between them. From these two divided structures, social and psychic superficial mirages ensued: on the one hand, ideological and fetishistic representations of society, which did no justice to the multiple social strata; on the other, introspective images of the psychic apparatus, the distorted nature of which resulted from the fact that they emerged from the conscious layers of psychic life (from the ego), and left out the unconscious regions.