Imaginary of the group and group formations centered on the knowledge

Abstract

The imaginary of the group will be the core concept of this article. In order to capture its senses, we will comment on the meanings given to the word in the dictionaries and the specialized literature, particularly in the psychoanalytical literature. In the pedagogical or teaching field, the Imaginary will be thought as a deployment of scenes of the group, of “other scenes” that, beyond the evident and visible aspects of a group encounter, fold and unfold in the life and evolution of a group. Thinking the group as a set of scenes allows going beyond the representative and symbolic sense of the image to venture into the sense of imagination and, from there, into the sphere of the imaginary as something that creates and reveals the senses. The imaginary of the group will be conceived as something that, from its group nature, can be staged, whether as script or as an expression of conscious or unconscious meanings related to fantasy, into something that beats, and folds and unfolds in the movement of the occurrences of the group, revealing itself in various ways. These scenes are what exposes the conscious or unconscious senses, on the one hand, and what creates new sense, on the other. In this article, we will establish the place of the imaginary in some group formations that have been conceptualized in the pedagogical field, and we will develop the type of formation that is typical of some teaching and educational groups: the formations centered on the knowledge.