Description: Turns to theories and cultural representations of psychosocial life to reflect on, and better understand, the challenges of learning in times of social strife.
Brief description: Deborah P. Britzman is the author of Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning; The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions; and A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom: On the Human Condition in Education, all published by SUNY Press, among many other books.
Review Quotes:
"Experienced teachers do not need to be reminded of the impossibility of their profession. Still, there have been surprisingly few psychoanalytic scholars who have explored the ways in which education arouses intense resistance in students and teachers alike. For this reason, Deborah P. Britzman's work has been noteworthy." -- Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
"While ideas about education recede and reappear in the course of our histories, with this book, Deborah Britzman makes of psychoanalysis an education all its own. As in her previous work, her ability to visualize the complexity of our inner and outer selves, and the role played by pedagogy therein, draws on a modern feminist sensibility. Without sidestepping nor simplifying worldly problems, she offers her readers new insights into the human experience: from the symbolization put forth by dream images to the residue of unresolved social traumas, she shows that that history fuses psychoanalysis and education, forming the unifying undercurrent that lies beneath our experience of everyday reality." -- Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work
"This book constitutes a rare combination of highly original theoretical thinking with literary style and structure. Its contribution to the field of psychoanalytic-educational research (and far beyond it) is huge. When History Returns both connects the psychoanalytic and the educational 'task'--placing the whole issue of education within a very broad context that touches on history, social thinking, dream work, and the topic of transference, among many other topics--and enacts, in its very writing, the same breadth and depth to which it points and aims. It is a theoretical-literary document that is not only rare in the intellectual challenge it offers but also rare in its beauty." -- Dana Amir, author of Psychoanalysis on the Verge of Language: Clinical Cases on the Edge