Fear of Mathematics and Trauma in the Relationship with Learning: a psychoanalytical reading

Abstract

Mathematics, historically identified in the social imaginary as difficult and, therefore, made for a few, appears in the school context sometimes as a source of pleasure for some students, sometimes as suffering for others, who flee from it whenever possible. Thus, in this work, we intend to understand and analyze students' trauma with mathematical learning difficulties from a psychoanalytic perspective, based on testimonials from university students attended by the Serviço de Apoio Pedagógico (SAP) of the Universidade Federal do Oeste da Bahia (UFOB). For this, Freudian psychoanalytic literature on trauma was used, in a movement that sought to intertwine the students' theoretical perceptions and testimonies about their desires, fears, and anxieties regarding the dialectic of knowing/not-knowing, based on the assumption that the classroom is a place of life that allows the encounter of stories, desires, subjectivities, pleasures, and sufferings, where teachers and students, often traumatized in their relations with knowledge, are also involved by the dimension of the unconscious that appears in the pedagogical scene. Among other propositions, we think that the rejection and mental block in relation to school mathematics and everything that approaches it, even if unconsciously, may result from possible traumatic relationships of the subject with this knowledge, woven throughout the entire constitution of your psychic history.