Offers a new view of pedagogical practices to psychoanalysts interested in pedagogy. 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.

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.

With the push toward accountability and test performance in schools there has been a decline in emphasis on creativity, imagination, and feelings in schools. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools is designed for students and professionals who are interested in restoring such values to their work with children. There is an absence of psychoanalytic ways of thinking in conventional professional discourses of schooling. With a few notable exceptions, the discourses of child development, classroom management, early childhood education, special education, school psychology, and school counseling have constructed notions of children and schooling that are often behaviorist, instrumental, and symptom-focused. Curriculum too often focuses on acquisition of knowledge and behaviors; discipline is conceptualized as compliance, and symptoms such as anger, school resistance, etc., are pathologized and reacted to out of context; children’s special needs are often conceptualized instrumentally; and children with complex psychological symptoms are delimited, depersonalized, or simply removed. Professionals who work with children psychodynamically draw on diverse frameworks including the work of Anna Freud, the long tradition of the Tavistock Clinic in London [e.g., Anne Alvarez, Susan Reid, Margaret Rustin, Frances Tustin, etc.], the writings of Klein, Winnicott, and their colleagues, French analysts [e.g., Piera Aulagnier, Didier Anzieu, Laurent Danon-Boileau, Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni, and Catherine Mathelin] and Italian infant/child analyst Alessandro Piontelli. This work is valuable but often inaccessible to school professionals because the writing is somewhat specialized, and because there is no tradition of teaching such work in professional preparation in those fields. This collection is theoretically grounded in that the authors share a commitment to valuing children’s emotions and understand the usefulness of psychoanalytic approaches for enhancing children’s lives. It is laden with examples to invite into this discussion those students and professionals who value these ideas but for whom this book may be their first introduction to progressive educational ideals and psychodynamic ways of working with children. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools provides an introductory volume to open the door to the possibility of introducing psychodynamic frameworks to education and human service professors and school professionals and professionals working with children.

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

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.

This book argues for education's reconsideration of what psychoanalytic theories of love and hate might mean to the design of learning and pedagogy. Britzman sets in tension three perspectives: studies of education, studies in psychoanalysis, and studies of ethics to consider how larger social and cultural histories live in the small history of the subject. Britzman casts her net widely to consider questions of sex education, the work of Anna Freud in reencountering the Diary of Anne Frank, reading practices in pedagogy, anti-racist pedagogy and the question of love, and the arguments between education and psychoanalysis.