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 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 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.

This revised edition of the classic text explores the complexity of what learning to teach means. While the research on teacher education continues to proliferate, Practice Makes Practice remains the discipline’s indispensable classic text. Drawing upon critical ethnography, this new edition of this best-selling book asks the question, what does learning to teach do and mean to newcomers and to those who surround them? Deborah P. Britzman writes poignantly of the struggle for significance and the contradictory realities of secondary teaching. She offers a theory of difficulty in learning and explores why the blaming of individuals is so prevalent in education. The completely revised introduction presents a refined and further developed theoretical framework and analysis, discussing why we might return to a study of teaching and learning. Also included in this updated edition is an insightful “hidden chapter” that comments on the methodology of the study and some of the dilemmas the author continues to face as her own thinking develops around the issues of representing teaching and learning for those just entering the profession. Deborah P. Britzman is Distinguished Research Professor at York University. She is the author of many books, including The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions; After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning; and Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning, all published by SUNY Press.

This book will provide a way of using psychoanalytic psychologies to think about some of the processes and experiences of learning and teaching.

As one of the first theorists to explore the unconscious fantasies, fears, and desires underlying religious ideas and practices, Freud con be considered one of the grandparents of the field of Religious Studies. Yet his legacy is deeply contested. How can Freud be taught in a climate of critique and controversy? The fourteen contributors to this volume, all recognized scholars of religion and psychoanalysis, describe how they address Freud's contested legacy; they "teach the debates." They go on to describe their courses on Freud and religion, their innovative pedagogical practices, and the creative ways they work with resistance.

As individuals engaged with children and those around them, educational psychologists enter a multitude of systems and relationships with the intention of helping. This often involves working in a context of confusion, conflict and creativity, a dynamic tension which is reflected in the chapters of this book. Designed to give both students and practitioners access to the experience of engaging with a dynamic unconscious, this volume investigates some of the key tenets and principles of psychoanalytic theory and demonstrates ways in which educational psychologists have used both theory and practice in their roles. Each chapter approaches a recognisable activity from educational psychology practice and provides an account of how psychoanalytic theories about our unique inner worlds and our unconscious processes can inform and enrich these interactions.