The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions

A startling reading of the educational enterprise through a psychoanalytic lens.

For anyone who has ever been to school, the very thought of education recalls an emotional world denounced. What happens then if we try to understand the emotional scenery of education? Author Deborah P. Britzman proposes that the psychoanalysis of love and hate in learning provides creative commentary on our contemporary educational controversies. Drawing upon novels, art, psychoanalytic theory, clinical material, and philosophical debates on human nature, Britzman presents a psychoanalytic education of uncertainty. She focuses on key encounters: thinking, development, reading, psychology, transference, countertransference, and learning a profession. From the collapse of contemporary pedagogical themes to the work of reparation, Britzman explores the fantasies of education for the purpose of returning ideas of grace, hope, humor, and humility to the impossible professions (education, government, and medicine).

Bringing analytic complexity to the subject of doubt, [Britzman] offers interesting commentary on the university, early education, candidate learning. CHOICE

Britzman accomplishes something quite remarkable: with great dexterity, she uses education to find themes that span diagonally across what were once thought as disparate schools of psychoanalytic thought. Teachers College Record