This book addresses an area that is theoretically undeveloped in educational studies-the constitution of the human subject. The author uses psychoanalysis to explore this gap in critical studies of education. Educational progressivism overestimates the power of rationality and represses any understanding of unconscious mental processes. What is needed is the development of a psychodynamic 'social psychology of classes.' According to the author, we need to investigate the differential relations between institutional and self-formative processes.