ABSTRACT

This chapter argues the area of special educational needs, and autism in particular, is a fertile crucible for illuminating and exploring the concept of productive uncertainty. Its contents are uncertainty pervades the work of teachers in the classroom, concomitantly that the concept of productive uncertainty application in many areas of school life. The chapter discusses Wilfred Bion's perspective, the teachers intersubjective knowing of the child through that their involvement in or commitment to their becoming, is just as relevant in the mainstream classroom with the mainstream child as in the case of the teacher in a special school working with the child with autism. It aims to demonstrate the argument by presenting some case material derived from another study which used a modified infant observation approach. The chapter implies that teachers need to be not only teachers but therapists as well; that teachers should know more, not about emotional intelligence, but rather about psychoanalytic theories of emotionality.