Group dynamics in the classroom are a fundamental aspect of learning which, it is argued here, has not received sufficient academic interest. Increasingly, however, research on critical and alternative pedagogy is concerned with exploring the benefits of collaborative learning. This paper recalls the insights of two streams of French institutional pedagogy from the 1960s: the clinical and political dimensions of learning, and the benefits of group-based approaches in education. These pedagogies, based on structural analysis of relationships in the classroom, explore first how teachers' and learners' hierarchical relationships to knowledge impede exchange and communication in traditional pedagogies; and, second, how the teacher's traditional stance in the classroom tends to reinforce psychological stress in learners by placing the teacher as a new parental figure. Both pedagogies introduce mediations or techniques inspired by Freinet, such as the learners' council, which disrupt hierarchies in the classroom. These mediations enable learners to overcome their mental and affective blocks and become active agents of their individual and collective learning processes.