The intimate unknown: a reflection on infantile, psychoanalysis and education

ABSTRACT This article problematizes psychoanalytically and philosophically the affirmative discourses about childhood, which, starting from the supposed in-fans condition, have been limited to talking about and for the child, as well as defining, diagnosing, pathologizing and medicating her. For this purpose, it recovers the Freudian notion of the infantile, not as a condition circumscribed to a chronological phase of human development, but as the amalgam of archaic experiences structuring the, including from which the determining modes of relationship with others unfold. Such a premise produces important implications in the educational field, since it requires both an educator that is aware of the existence of this infantile in himself and in the other as well as the limits of his knowledge about the child and childhood; consequently, greater attention to the (im)possibilities of educating.