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Book Award Winner Anticipating Education is an interdisciplinary collection of Britzman’s previously published and unpublished papers that examines the dilemmas created by anticipating education, provoked when teachers, students, and professors encounter the unknown while trying to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

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.

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.

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.

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.