Children’s literacy and literacy: teaching functions from the perspective of the Generalized Seduction Theory

Abstract

The process of literacy and literacy for children is a central moment in their entry into the world of written language, and is also emotionally significant. Teachers are decisively involved in this, whose pedagogical work assumes the character of mediation in the construction of literate knowledge and the first contacts with the written text. Therefore, in this article, resulting from a Pedagogy course conclusion work, Adriana Lessa Viana, with guidance from Fernando César Bezerra de Andrade, developed qualitative research, of a theoretical nature, of a descriptive-bibliographical and interpretative type, to answer the question: what functions do unconscious psychics take on teachers in their relationship with children in the literacy and literacy process? To answer it, we aim, in the light of Jean Laplanche’s Generalized Seduction Theory, to understand the teaching functions in the relationship with children in the literacy and literacy process. We postulate, as a hypothesis, that, in the context of teacher-student relationships during literacy and literacy training – always marked by the reopening of the fundamental anthropological situation that gave rise to the unconscious psyche –, there are two simultaneous teaching functions: seducing and supporting translations. To seduce means, on a conscious level, to motivate them to learn, and on an unconscious level, it also means to address to children enigmatic messages associated with the teacher’s own desire to know, which in origins is sexual (in the Freudian-Laplanchean sense, that is, as a drive, perverse, polymorph). Supporting translations implies providing affective and cultural conditions for the translation of the enigmatic through literacy, so that, in literacy, both the exercise of theorizing about oneself and the world and the resulting theories themselves are included. We conclude that teaching functions are fundamental so that children, learning to read and write, can also be motivated by their desires and support them so that the new enigmas (of letters) allow them to update and translate the first enigmas (those of generalized seduction).