Qué sɘ-cuela en la escuela: un análisis de la legislación argentina sobre salud mental y educación, en articulación con la perspectiva ética y antiautoritaria de Siegfried Bernfeld

Abstract

This thesis analyzes Argentine legislation in relation to mental health and education, especially the four laws (known as the package of 26) that produce a true legal transformation in the country, since they incorporate the postulates of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and with them, a paradigm of integral protection is achieved. The Act of the National Interministerial Commission on Mental Health and Addictions (2014) is also reviewed in depth, in whose pages a series of guidelines and recommendations are offered to avoid hasty diagnoses and the medicalization of children from mere observation of undesirable behaviors. This document and the aforementioned laws are articulated with the thought of Siegfried Bernfeld (1892-1953), a pioneer in the intersection between Psychoanalysis and Education. A journey through the work of this psychoanalyst disciple of Freud is proposed and his experience of anti-authoritarian education is recovered in the Children's Colony of Baumgarten, a space where he welcomed war orphans in 1919. Then, from the intersection between the laws and in Bernfeld's work, intermediate categories are elaborated that allow addressing the three dimensions by which, despite the great advance in rights, authoritarian practices of the past still creep in (survive and are updated): the place of the adult compared to children, the discipline imparted by a technical authority and the institutional conditions that allow or not open spaces for listening. Finally, passages from the work of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) are taken up, whose ideas about proletarian children's theater are related to Bernfeld thought and to the postulates of the Argentine legislation studied.