The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions

Deborah P. Britzman

may 2009 · State University of New York Press

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Winner of the 2009 Gary A. Olson Award presented by JAC - a journal of rhetoric, culture, and politics

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).

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Deborah P. Britzman is Distinguished Research Professor at York University. She is the author of many books, including Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, Revised Edition and Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning, both also published by SUNY Press.