Educational Transformation, Fragmentation, and Psychic Conflict

Abstract

This paper seeks to present some personal conclusions on the concept of health, focused on the plane of subjectivity, that is, on what is today called mental health. These reflections are articulated with a concrete analysis of the identity contradictions expressed by teachers in Jujuy in relation to the process of Educational Transformation.

Our notions of psychism and mental health are based on the idea that the human being is a bio-socio-psychological unity and, moreover, that the ideas held about the body and even about its own functioning are conditioned by social organization. Thus, rather than speaking of a “relationship” between health and the social sciences, we understand health as a social, and therefore historical, notion. Once the narrowness of an organicist perspective has been overcome, health falls fully within the field of the social sciences.

The analysis of teachers’ identity conflicts forms part of a research project that has been developed since 1998 by the Social Psychology teaching team at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, entitled “Models of Teacher Identity in the Educational Transformation: Jujuy Teachers and Their Social Context”. The preparation of this report has served as a stimulus to approach the topic from the angle of mental health, on the basis of the notion of psychic conflict.