O ensino da língua inglesa na escola pública: uma leitura psicanalítica do gozo

Abstract

This essay has as a general objective to identify and reflect on what are the possible signs of jouissance of English language teachers from regular public schools, relying on theories of discourse and psychoanalysis in order to point why the subjects maintain their practice in public schools despite complaints around them, their difficulties or even misfortunes, and yet remain lively and engaged in their teaching. In the theoretical chapter we approached the area of applied linguistics to the teaching of the English Language (EL), from where we have developed this research. This area opens up for a dialogue with the Franco-Brazilian theory of Discourse Analysis (DA) affected by the psychoanalytic concept of subjectivity, which enables us to use psychoanalytic concepts, in especial, those related to the concept of jouissance for understanding the vicissitudes of teaching education. We start, thus, from Lacan readings of Freud and other psychoanalytic concepts developed by Lacan necessary to approach the human subject and to develop our analysis, which are modeled on principles of DA, which takes the linguistic materiality in relation to the discourse memory. Believing that psychoanalysis has its contribution to offer to the English language trainer and teacher, the choice of the enunciators was based on an attempt to listen to teachers who apparently were enlivened by the feminine jouissance. Aware that an interpretation can always become another, and that it is never exhausting, this research aimed to contribute for trainers and teachers to problematize their career paths, to question their modes of jouissance, their desires, and their engagement towards their professions. There is one aspect in the constitution of the subject that determines its relation to the object that it is not possible to apprehend in the few interviews we have developed. Although these teachers derive secondary gains from mortifying situations, they also derive enlivening gains in their relation with the object voice. Their enchantment with singing in English during childhood and adolescence resonates in their teaching and in their relationship with their students.