The grammar of control and the language of childhoods

notes for the exercise of the ethics of care

Abstract

The article offers a psychoanalytic and decolonial reading of symbolic, affective, and institutional forms of violence in schools, especially at the beginning of schooling. It draws on Sigmund Freud to understand trauma as a failure of symbolization and on Sándor Ferenczi to formulate the “confusion of languages” between the adult's normative discourse and the child’s bodily-affective language. It engages with Michel Foucault to highlight biopower within pedagogies of control and with Manfred Liebel to assert protagonistic childhoods as subjects of agency, rights, and participation. Through Silvia Bleichmar, it shows how institutional silencing produces traumatic adaptation and drives early medicalization. The text criticizes the dominance of performance, standardization, and productivity, which convert suffering into “deviance.” In response, it proposes the ethics of care — radical listening, presence, and bonding — as a clinical and political stance capable of sustaining suffering without erasure and transforming schools into spaces of symbolization and recognition.