The teacher as therapist? -: On the relation between education and therapy in the field of education for maladjusted children

Education for maladjusted children is characterized by a special openness regarding therapeutical approaches of interpretation and action. The terminological pair "pedagogical-therapeutical" is here used with the greatest non-chalance and the majority of the academic representatives of the discipline may be assigned to either one or the other therapeutical school. In this, however, the critical debatte on the relation between education and therapy which has long been led in general pedagogics as well as in general therapeutical pedagogics is, amazingly, hardly ever taken into account. There, the positions range from the assertion of the basic incompatibility of education and therapy via the thesis of the implicitly therapeutical dimension of all pedagogical action to the opinion that therapeutical acting is to be considered a special case of the pedagogical practice. It is shown in how far the diverse attempts to define and to determine the relation to other fields are characterized by distorting and misleading imputations voiced by the respective "other side". The author assumes the search for an effective pedagogical "technology-substitute-technology" to be the motive for the special openness of education for children with behavior problems regarding the diverse therapeutical approaches. A special position of psyche-analytic pedagogics is asserted in so far as the latter has most clearly renounced such deductive-technological ideas.