New engagement with the future: International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations' 38th Annual Meeting 2022

This PDW uses psychoanalysis to disrupt the assumptions embedded within contemporary modes of teaching and learning. We will explore the potential of psychoanalysis to further our understanding of the realities of education, both now and in the future. Insights from psychoanalysis include the importance of paying attention to unconscious anxieties, fantasies, and psychological defenses. Applying these insights to learning spaces, and their concomitant stresses and anxieties, provides critical scholars and educators with concepts useful for understanding the psychosocial (collective) defenses that arise in response to anxiety-inducing social, cultural, and institutional pressures. The unconscious permeates a range of phenomena across educational systems: individual (student, teacher), interpersonal (teaching dyad), group (classroom), organization (institutional), and social (discourses of pedagogy, politics). Psychosocial defenses often serve to create undiscussable and collusive resistance to the work of learning, essentially erecting a form of willful ignorance to avoid the anxieties of not knowing. We contend that through psychoanalysis, such dynamics may become knowable and discussable. Further, psychoanalysis lends both teachers and students useful strategies for managing the anxieties associated with undoing what we think we know about providing, or obtaining, management education. This PDW may benefit researchers and scholars who, regardless of career stage, wish to explore and engage with the potential of psychoanalysis for deepening their understanding of the complexities of teaching and learning, and in doing so deepen our potential for building a better world.