Psychoanalysis, fundamentalism, critical theory and the unconscious: adult education Islamic fundamentalism and the subjectivity of omnipotence

The chapter explores the quality of our relationship to knowledge and to the other and otherness. Using a psychosocial lens, and auto/biographical narrative research, fundamentalism, racism and grand academic theory can be seen as a defensive orientation to experience. Defensiveness works at a primitive, pre-intellectual and often unconscious group level. This is contrasted with the history of workers' education, where, in the best cases, dialogue was kept going, sometimes across the profoundest of differences. A theory of self/other recognition is used to explain some of the processes involved.