In this article we present and outline depth-hermeneutics as a new application of a theoretically founded psychosocial approach, with the ambition of inspiring teachers to explore challenging aspects of their relational work with students. Empirical knowledge and psychodynamic theory suggest that teaching and learning are profoundly rooted in relationship based processes. Hence it is a prerequisite for improving learning and supporting teachers' professional development that challenging aspects in the student-teacher relationship be taken seriously by being examined, with the aim of enabling and supporting learning from experience in reflective practice. We suggest that group-based depth-hermeneutics, a qualitative psychosocial method, may allow for analysis and interpretation of situations and relations in school that may be experienced by teachers as difficult or incomprehensible. Drawing on an empirical example from fieldwork in a Norwegian middle school, we illustrate the nature of a challenging situation and relation in teaching and show step-by-step how depth-hermeneutics can be adapted, adopted, implemented, and facilitated in teacher groups, to increase scenic understanding of such complex phenomena.

In this theoretical paper, we reflect on the optimistic neoliberal fantasies that are played out in today’s education, even though that they rarely live up to their promises. Inspired by Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, and psychoanalytical thinkers as Slavoj Žižek and Ilan Kapoor, and their focus on concepts such as fantasy, desire, enjoyment, and the unconscious, we argue that there is a contemporary tendency for critical thinking and complicated conversations to be neglected or avoided in education, especially these forms of thinking and conversations that can question the neoliberal fantasmatic order and the cruelnss as well as the enjoyment that come with it. Instead, educational institutions and educators must live up to the demands of the big (neoliberal market) Other and its desire for positive student evaluations that mirror satisfaction and quality regarding the educational “product” that students are promised. How it looks will be illustrated by means of examples that derive from a Danish educational context. On that basis, we claim that we are witnessing a form of satisfaction tyranny in education and discuss what it means if educational institutions and educators cannot release themselves from their neoliberal involvement.