This book provides a unique and highly topical application of psychoanalytic theory to the broad context of education, including schools, universities, and adult learning. Education is understood as a crucial element in a lifelong project to gain more coherent and meaningful understanding of self and others. Psychoanalysis has taken the contingency, construction, and development of human subjectivity, as well as the difficulty of thinking, to be its prime preoccupation. Yet - at a time of increasing doubt and anxiety about the purposes and practice of education - psychoanalytic understanding, from various traditions, has never been more marginal in educational debate. The book seeks, in these terms, to bridge some of this gap: it is written for teachers, trainers, policy-makers, clinicians, researchers, and diverse academics who want to look beyond bland superficialities to deeper struggles for self and understanding. This includes unconscious processes in the relationships that constitue education as well as resistance to new ideas and practices.

A 2022 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner Anticipating Education is an interdisciplinary collection of Britzman’s previously published and unpublished papers that examines the dilemmas created by anticipating education, provoked when teachers, students, and professors encounter the unknown while trying to know emotional situations affecting their waiting, wanting, and wishing for teaching and learning. Anticipation has a particular flavor in scenes of education and not only since schooling presents again the mise-en-scène of childhood; anticipation also signifies the estranged temporality of anxiety, phantasies, and defense that compose and decompose hopes for transforming knowledge, sociality, and subjectivity in group life. This book is composed of Britzman’s well regarded and highly cited conceptual contributions to thinking broadly on topics of intersubjectivity and pedagogy at the university and schools; the reception of difficult knowledge as unresolved social conflicts in pedagogical thought; and the significance of psychoanalysis with pedagogy. Four themes address the anxieties of teaching and learning: phantasies of education; difficult knowledge; transforming subjects; and, psychoanalysis with education. Anticipating Education is required reading for every newly-minted faculty member. The wisdom provided in this volume will prove to be invaluable to your future career. Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Education | Theories of Teaching and Learning | Special Topics | Advanced Curriculum Theory | Philosophy of Education | Social Thought and Education | Studies of Language, Culture and Teaching | Child and Adolescent Development

A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom provides rich descriptions of the surprising ways individuals handle matters of love and hate when dealing with reading and writing in the classroom. With wit and sharp observations, Deborah P. Britzman advocates for a generous recognition of the vulnerabilities, creativity, and responsibilities of university learning. Britzman develops themes that include the handling of technique in psychoanalysis and pedagogy, the uses of theory, regression to adolescence, the inner life of gender, the untold story of the writing block, and everyday mistakes in teaching and learning. She also examines the relationship between mental health and experiences of teaching and learning.

This is the first and only book to detail the history of the century-long relationship between education and psychoanalysis. Relying on primary and secondary sources, it provides not only a historical context but also a psychoanalytically informed analysis. In considering what it means to think about teaching from a psychoanalytic perspective and in reviewing the various approaches to and theories about teaching and curriculum that have been informed by psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, Taubman uses the concept of disavowal and focuses on the effects of disavowed knowledge within both psychoanalysis and education and on the relationship between them. Tracing three historical periods of the waxing and waning of the medical/therapeutic and emancipatory projects of psychoanalysis and education, the thrust of the book is for psychoanalysis and education to come together as an emancipatory project. Supplementing the recent work of educational scholars using psychoanalytic concepts to understand teaching, education, and schooling, it works to articulate the stranded histories ─ the history of what could have been and might still be in the relationship between psychoanalysis and education.

Examining the work of Lacan and Freud, Cho argues that a theory of pedagogy is already embedded within psychoanalysis. Psychopedagogy is the name given to this embedded theory. Through a discussion of key psychoanalytic concepts, as well as a variety of other topics, Cho develops the contours of psychopedagogy.

Training in psychoanalysis is a long and demanding process. However, the quality of education available is hugely variable across the world. The structure of psychoanalytic education, centered on the hierarchical "training analysis" system, reflected a concerted effort to maintain a stable and high quality educational process. However, throughout time this system has become a major source of institutional contradictions that affect the training of candidates, the scientific developments within psychoanalysis, and the nexus of psychoanalytic theory and practice with the surrounding scientific, social and cultural world. Psychoanalytic Education at the Crossroads examines the ways in which group processes, the hierarchal culture in institutes, the influence of individual personalities, the lack of research and the faults in supervision can all stifle creativity and hinder candidates’ progress. In this compelling work, Otto Kernberg sets out clear suggestions for how these issues can be addressed, and how he sees the future of psychoanalytic education across all psychoanalytic settings and schools of thought. The first part of this volume is focused primarily on the analysis of the nature of these problems and their effects on the personal analysis and supervision of candidates; on theoretical and clinical seminars; on selection, progression, and graduation; on educational principles and requirements, developments of theory and technique and, in particular, limitation versus expansion of the realm of interests and applications of psychoanalysis. The second part of this volume deals with proposals of solutions to the problems encountered, and major suggestions for innovation in psychoanalytic education. The author’s work in this area has been hugely influential. Kernberg has made a substantive difference in the development of psychoanalytic institutes and education, and continues to do so. Psychoanalytic Education at the Crossroads will be essential reading to anyone involved in psychoanalytic education, whether as a psychoanalyst, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, trainee, trainer, or supervisor.

This book introduces the insights of contemporary relational psychoanalysis to educational thought and uses them as the foundation for a comprehensive model for understanding and informing teaching and learning practice. The model integrates what we know about conscious thought, motivation, and the physical body and translates these understandings in ways that are meaningful and relevant to the circumstances of practicing teachers, school leaders, and teachers of teachers. It will be of great interest to them and to those educational scholars whose attentions turn to the exigencies of the current era. Echoing calls for inclusivity, the book stands against admonishing anyone on the right way to be a person. Instead it emphasises understanding and, in understanding, practicing well. Readers will gain a deeper appreciation of the nature of sense-making and awareness and of the practical implications of cognition as embodied, life forms as non-linear dynamic systems, and relationships as core to human development and classroom life. It was Einstein who, in a letter to Freud, once asked for an educational solution to the menace of war. Today’s urgencies – of nations divided, diminishing planetary resources, and certain ecological disasters – press for wisdom beyond our collective habit. Thankfully the once-elusive mysteries of life, mind, learning, and learning systems now yield in ways to help shape answers to Einstein’s question. Relational psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, educational theorists, teachers, and those who work with them will be intrigued by the convergences and heartened at the possibilities.

Education and the Fantasies of Neoliberalism revitalizes conversations about the nature and purpose of education in a global context characterized by concerns about quality and equity in education, reflecting wider economic and political anxieties around declining productivity and social inclusion. The book illustrates how Lacanian psychoanalytic theory offers a conceptual vocabulary for exposing and critiquing the fantasmatic nature of policy and practice, while foregrounding the tensions and contradictions they seek to conceal. Specifically, the book draws on ideas of lack, fantasy and desire from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to gain insights into the contentious but disavowed politics of reform in education. The book builds on cutting-edge work in political and psychoanalytic theory to offer unique insights that challenge and contest the simplistic and often trivializing readings of education in contemporary media and political debates. Offering a novel perspective on education policy reform, this book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of philosophy of education and educational policy and politics.

Learning from the Other presents a philosophical investigation into the ethical possibilities of education, especially social justice education. In this original treatment, Sharon Todd rethinks the ethical basis of responsibility as emerging out of the everyday and complex ways we engage difference within educational settings. She works through the implications of the productive tension between the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and that of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Judith Butler, Cornelius Castoriadis, and others. Challenging the idea that knowledge about the other is the answer to questions of responsibility, she proposes that responsibility is rooted instead in a learning from the other. The author focuses on empathy, love, guilt, and listening to highlight the complex nature of learning from difference and to probe where the conditions for ethical possibility might lie.