Obedience puts us off. Associated with courage in Ancient Greece, seeked as a permanent frame of mind in the age of monasteries, and morally suspicious since the atrocities of World War II, obedience is, to say the least, infinitely complex. Although often likened to passivity, obedience veritably is an action on the part of the subject in its dealings with the social. It is one aspect of the subject’s general positioning within the social and the various utterances it involves, with the latter coming from a place of authority or domination in certain power dynamics. However, obedience works in specific ways for the educators responsible for teenagers in a children’s care home. It reveals itself as an ambiguous notion that this thesis attempts to conceptualise through a psychoanalytic exploration of the historical, philosophical, and sociological, discourses, from Antiquity to this day. I mobilise the notion of obedience to investigate the complex positionings of social education professionals. Being the paradigm of social relations, obedience brings us face to face with the question of the individual’s knotting together of its subjective position, the contingencies of the outside world, and the relationships the subject creates with authority and power. As at once a knotting in itself and that with which the subject has to negotiate, obedience either leads to a position of submission or to a choice, a decision. When this knotting does not happen, symptoms irrupt and set the subject in motion again, putting it to work. We could therefore say that it is as impossible not to obey as it is to be outside of any social rapport. It is, however, necessary to choose from the various subjective knottings of, and with, obedience; an inescapable, complex, and dynamic, choice, if ever there was one.