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

From the author of In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer comes an intensive look at the practice of psychoanalysis through interviews with “Aaron Green,” a Freudian analyst in New York City. Malcolm is accessible and lucid in describing the history of psychoanalysis and its development in the United States. It provides rare insight into the contradictory world of psychoanalytic training and treatment and a foundation for our understanding of psychiatry and mental health. "Janet Malcom has managed somehow to peer into the reticent, reclusive world of psychoanalysis and to report to us, with remarkable fidelity, what she has seen. When I began reading I thought condescendingly, 'She will get the facts right, and everything else wrong.' She does get the facts right, but far more pressive, she has been able to capture and convey the claustral atmosphere of the profession. Her book is journalism become art." —Joseph Andelson, The New York Times Book Review

In classrooms and lectures we learn not only about academic topics but also about ourselves, our peers and how people and ideas interact. Education – An Impossible Profession extends the ways in which we might think about these processes by offering a refreshing reconsideration of key educational experiences including those of: being judged and assessed, both formally and informally adapting to different groups for different purposes struggling to think under pressure learning to recognise and adapt to the expectations of others. This book brings psychoanalysis to new audiences, graphically illustrating its importance to understandings of teaching, learning and classrooms. Drawing on the author’s original research, it considers the classroom context, including policy demands and professional pressures, and the complexity of peer and pedagogic relationships and interactions asking how these might be being experienced and what implications such experiences might have for learners and teachers. The discussions will be of interest not only to teachers, leading-learners and teacher-educators, but also to individuals interested in education policy, professional practice and theories of education.