The possible training: the Oedipus, Narcissus, and Telemachus schools

Abstract

The article proposes a reading of the school through three matrices—School-Oedipus, School-Narcissus, and School-Telemachus—conceived not as clinical diagnoses or historical stages, but as coexisting operators. The problem addressed concerns how these complexes affect the possibility of formation, understood as the articulation between law, knowledge, and desire. Adopting a hermeneutic and conceptual approach, the text draws on interpretations of classical literary figures to describe different modes of authority and transmission. School-Oedipus absolutizes law and knowledge, resulting in a closed curriculum, vertical discourse, and the sanctioning of error, thereby producing obedience without authorization and continuity without active inheritance. School-Narcissus designates the regime of image and performance-based equivalence: specular fixation of the self and subjectless voice close off the bond, flatten temporality, and privilege immediate enjoyment, leaving no place for desire. In contrast, School-Telemachus restores the symbolic third and a law-as-limit that enables desire, articulating inheritance and testimony. The article concludes that formation becomes possible when an embodied voice authorizes without closure and opens a world.