As it is observed, knowing something is different from hearing it from someone else. Most of the psycho -pedagogical or clinical approaches of psychologists consider a taxonomy where the specialist is someone who possesses knowledge about the subject and who’s in a position of power without considering the effect that it may cause on the patient. On the contrary, the basic premise of psycho-analytic therapeutics is to give up knowledge and focus on the desires of the own subject in order to give him/her the opportunity to get straight his/her own motivations and ideas.

When considering therapeutics as knowledge about the desires of others, specialists may set up a kind of after-education, since they may repeat the process that made possible earlier education given by the patient’s family.

In this case, the specialist passes himself off as one of the individual’s parents stepping into the place of a parent-educator; due to the love for the parental figure, the patient evokes the rewards for commandment and punishment for transgression.

Since the topic has been brought up, it is important to ask about the role of the special educator in school environment and, in order to find some answers on this regard, some Freud’s (1911/2005) formulations concerning education are taken up, as he relates it with the incitement to the conquest of the pleasure principle. This principle is the one governing the subject’ id, until it is replaced by the reality principle. The subject is able to replace one for the other through love rewards, thus the educator, through a transference relationship, substitutes the student’s own parental figures; consequently, special educators should handle their work ethically because they work upon material which is plastic and open to every impression and they must keep before themselves an obligation not to mould subject’s mind in accordance with their own personal ideals (Freud, 1911/2005; 1913/2005).

Opposite to what has just been mentioned, as far as the psychoanalyst is concerned, according to Freud (1912/2005), the analyst should be open to listening to, and facilitate freedom of expression via floating attention. In psychoanalysis, precise protocols on clinical history worth less than they seem because they align with a pseudo attitude trying to clarify the patient’s symptomatic actions so as to orientate him into a classification. In El porvenir de una ilusión (1927/2005), Freud establishes culture homogenizes subjects within a psychiatric classification, it is important to mention that most of all psychological trends based on the scientific theory work in the same way. These classifications are meant to describe the type of mental development in order to explain the disparities of those who in the tests did not achieve the standard IQ, considering it as a homogenous quantity. So the notion of capacity to decide the orientation of a subject prevails.

A different approach related to the second type of marginalization considers that psychoanalysis, according to Lacan’s Subversión del sujeto y dialéctica del deseo en el inconsciente freudiano (1966/2003), focuses on concepts related to subject’s unity in order to find answers to questions, and which must be discussed from the viewpoints of conduct and personality concepts but, above all, from the apparent consciousness given by ego.

Now, the relationship between psychoanalysis and special education can be discussed considering an ethics of listening. According to Pernicone (2001), it is important to know how to listen to a child with special educational needs, since he/she, as a subject, has the need and right to express his/her sufferings as well as the right to be seen as something more than an object- body. As a result, there is a need for a special psychoanalysis, one that draws attention to diagnosed special needs, and it is able to adapt its clinic and approach based on the demands of a particular language evoked by a subject urging to be seen.

In addition, Zelis and Salinas (2002) think the term disabled is frequently associated with the diagnosis of special educational needs. This association avoids the confusion between a subject who’s handicapped and one who’s disabled to express his desires, so the term prevents disabled subjects from being excluded. Making clear the differences can result in effective intervention within special education and, at the same time, it can open a space for reflection to those approaches understanding the subject with special educational needs as an individual who suffers and who must get attention, but also who must be listened to.1

For the time being, there are two schools of thought that relate the subject with special educational needs to the term disabled, as a victim of faith or as an individual with some natural disability. Both bring forward firmness on diagnosis and transcend the individuals’ quality life, the subject is part of a statistical cultural pattern and analyzed under a theory constraint given by education. In some occasions the diagnosis may have a kind of a stigma.

According to Ranieri (2000), when educational institutions or clinics treat children who have been diagnosed with a special educational need or development disorder, it is common to have more than one specialist treating the disabilities.2

That is how, psycho-pedagogy and psychomotor specialists, as well as phoniatricians, physicians, and teachers become part of what could be called intercrossed –transference, a concept that needs to be elucidated theoretically in connection with the intervention of psychoanalysts within interdisciplinary clinic. Psychoanalysis remains an area of agreement and disagreement due to the differences among the different approaches.

Ranieri (2000) says the example of the analytic clinic for children is enough to explain the intervention of psychoanalysts in the constitution of the subject, because they act from the construction of the play scene. This act not only keeps company to the child and entertains him/her but also constitutes a model of expression (the only one in many cases) because it implies a close relationship with fantasy. So, it is possible to speak of an everyday language that is forgotten frequently.

Melani Klein works the concept of play on her article of 1929, La personificación del juego en los niños (1929/2006), where she explains how play therapy reveals childrens’ unconscious fantasies, desires and experiences they are incapable of transmitting in words. Anxiety experienced in children’s development becomes a symptom of a life disturbance, thus analysis, listening carefully and ‘play’ allow anxiety release even when there are problems with symbolism. For Klein, play therapy is the new expression of an archaic symbolism, this fact could explain problems of expression, language and socialization.3

As a result there is a need for clinic techniques, as Aberasturi (1962/2004) mentioned before, so that children can express themselves freely when playing and therapists can observe the types of play they pick as well as the roles they assume, in order to interpret them later or while children are playing. This is possible when repetitive plays exist and the subject’s language is considered and consequently he/she can become an autonomous individual.

When considering the specialist out of the context of ethics of listening but within the use of play techniques, it is common to observe professionals, who work treating children, to follow a specific clinic intervention and recognize the importance of play in therapeutic sessions or consultation, since it allows a better rapport or psychoanalytic bond; in other words, they use play as a support technique to facilitate an specific action in therapy. For instance, specialists bend down to be the same size of children as well as to make eye contact and empathize, and that is very important for comprehensive psychologists. Conditions such as the mentioned before can help the therapeutic relationship, and this is why they become so important; however, the play referred to in this document is not only a part of a clinic intervention but it is the clinic intervention itself. The analyst, in the context of play, sometimes helps to construct and reconstruct the play scene where the subject constitutes himself/herself.

The approximation to children’s special educational needs from the institutional psychoanalysis approach includes the possibility to observe symptoms, account for complaints and create a social bond within the institutional and family context, since the child expresses his/her deepest thoughts as symptoms and the relationship with other children in the same conditions may support the development of a particular social bond. The child’s discovery about other families and children who share the same condition may help him/her to accept his/her own, so another alternative is offered to the subjective death sentence that assumes the position of a disabled person. To stake for a subjective production out of a victimizing position produces effects allowing the construction, recovery and relocation of a relationship with others.

(…) whether the analyst “knows” and orientates consciously children toward a competent reeducation service, or he/she tries to comprehend them no matter the time. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve chosen not to know, I’ve always taken the time to think and encourage children to be part of the conversion as long as possible (Mannoni, 1997, p.69).

As it can be observed, the author brought to light the practice being carried out in several institutions and she noticed specialists, who are influenced by organicist thesis, have settled various devices of reeducation, all of them were associated with consciousness related to instruction. Those mechanisms become ineffective when children do not benefit from them as they are not ready to become autonomous and responsible individuals; consequently, the device only prevents them from doing so by putting them into a position of patients who are receptive to knowledge, one that turns to be completely strange to them because they did not construct it themselves as subjects.

Taking up again the work developed by Mannoni as well as that of other authors and researchers, who have worked exhaustively on the topic of mental retardation, disability, infantile psychosis, etc. in relation to the subjective structuration,4 rescue their efforts made some years ago trying to subvert the subject and to take him/her to the light of insurrection.

The following is suggested as a major proposal to attend SEN:

• The first step refers to diagnosis; medical diagnosis must be as precise as possible. It includes listening to the child (subject) and observing the place he or she’s been given by the family according to the current psychic situation , as well as taking into consideration the words expressed by the child trough his/her particular language.
• The second step is giving the family their child back, that person who can be diagnosed and listened to in individual treatment sessions, and whose problems can be accounted for.

Also, the family needs to be advised on what should be arranged to improve the child’s attention. In the process, the active participation of the child or subject is fundamental as well as his own existence. Attention must not focus on his/her limitations resulting from his/her organic problem, but on the place he or she’s been given instead.

Within the conceptual confusion of attention oriented to the instruction, subjectivity seems not to have a clear place or at least not one of priority. Upon the discourse of specialists who regulate the problems related to SEN at an institutional level, there is unawareness about the effects of the subjective freedom that starts from special nature, and then it is related to a concept of structural homogenization, with the idea of a descriptive psychopathology applying deficit as a guiding principle.

Therefore, this research paper was considered an insurrection, a struggle for the recognition that behind the special attention given to every child, a particular dynamic of listening can be developed to grasp each one of the requests and desires expressed everyday by a desperate voice. This position reveals every person’s life path, since there is no need to talk about a disability in order to talk about our pass through this world. The objective is to raise awareness on the ethical premise of psychoanalysis that provides a space allowing the subversion of the subject. Once the stake of psychoanalysis has been presented, there is nothing else to add, but the fact that now specialists must dialogue to figure out the ethical positions governing within the psychological discipline and its relationship with special education when listening is considered.

2Which are held by the ideology of the classification mentioned before.

3A Klein’s clinical case that worked as the paradigm of the analysis of a child who was classified by a psychiatrist as a psychotic person (Prior diagnosis to the psychiatric proposal of the autistic phenomenon). It was the case of Dick, a 4-year old boy, whose vocabulary was poor and limited, who didn’t speak, and expressed himself through noises and incomprehensible sounds. He was motivated by Klein to express himself through play, and she helped him to develop vocabulary taking into consideration the fact of listening to (in this case attention) this proto-symbolic Language Cfr. Klein, M. (2006b La importancia de la formación de símbolos en el desarrollo del yo in Obras completas vol. I Paidós, Buenos Aires.

4Some of the most outstanding authors are M. Klein, A. Aberastury, W. Bion, D. Winnicott and many other psychoanalysts who, from the Freudian theory, did contribute to psychoanalysis by relating it to what in special education is referred to as Special Educational Needs, looking for a place for subjectivity and the singular elaboration.