Avatars of the Principle of Pleasure and the Principle of Reality in Education

Abstract

Sigmund Freud in his Autobiographical Presentation (1925) explicitly warns that he did not write anything about education; however, he says that the discoveries achieved in psychoanalysis in the journey through the exploration of the unconscious have interested other disciplines including pedagogy. In the few articles in which Freud alludes to this topic, he speaks of education in terms of dreams and hopes; he generally conceives education as a kind of prophylaxis of neuroses and perversions; nevertheless, psychoanalysis would act a posteriori at a therapeutic level. Only in one of his article Formulations on the Two Principles of Psychic Accomplishment (1911) –principle of displeasure and pleasure and principle of reality– Freud assigns education a specific function; in his own words: “Education can be described, without hesitation, as the incitement to overcome the pleasure principle and replace it with the principle of reality” (1989a, p. 228). This brief thesis contains the essence of the humanizing power of education that enables the subject to enter the circuit of culture by putting a stop to the self-destructive impulses promoted by the pleasure principle. Analyzing this thesis is the purpose of this paper.