Table Of ContentA Psychoanalyst in the Classroom
SUNY series, Transforming Subjects:
Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Studies in Education
Deborah P. Britzman, editor
A Psychoanalyst in
the Classroom
(cid:2)(cid:3)(cid:4)(cid:5)(cid:2)
On the Human Condition
in Education
DEBORAH P. BRITZMAN
SUNY
P R E S S
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
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© 2015 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Britzman, Deborah P.
A psychoanalyst in the classroom : on the human condition in education /
Deborah P. Britzman.
pages cm. — (Transforming Subjects: Psychoanalysis, Culture, and
Studies in Education)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5733-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5734-5 (e-book)
1. Learning, Psychology of. 2. Psychoanalysis and education. I. Title.
BF318.B785 2015
370.15—dc23 2014035447
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1. A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom: Character
Studies in the Human Condition of Education 1
2. “An Unexpected Novelty”: Freud’s Technique
Papers Go to the University 29
3. What Is the Use of Theory? 49
4. The Adolescent Teacher 67
5. On the Madness of Lecturing on Gender 87
6. The Untold Story of the Writing Block 105
7. The Psychopathologies of Everyday Education:
Sleeping, Falling, Forgetting, Lateness, and the
Professor’s Mistakes 129
vi Contents
Notes 151
References 161
Index 173
Acknowledgments
It almost goes without saying that having education is a good idea, that
it is both a social and individual imperative, and we do have to put mass
populations of very young children, adolescents, and young adults—to say
nothing of daycare workers, teachers, professors, among others—somewhere
and give them something to do. Yet education is not a waiting room for real
life, though it often feels that way. Even as we hope that the many years
spent in classrooms become the psychological glue (and not the psychologi-
cal zoo) for the social bond, the problem with things that go without saying
is that they are quickly forgotten. And this creates particular difficulties to
presenting what needs to be said about the education we forget.
Something is happening in the pedagogical relation that involves not
only why the industrial metaphor of factory has given way to the faceless
bureaucracy and then, to the multitasking, high-speed technological cor-
poration. Part of what has happened is this: Students are urged to become
clients with “takeaway knowledge”; professors are urged to deliver the goods
without too much affect; and this thumbs-up/ thumbs-down education seems
to justify the idealization of accountability, evidence-based practice, quality
assurance, professionalization, and standardization. Mainly, we are asked if
we like education. Neither is satisfaction nor education like that since each
pedagogical exchange, each desire, each mistake, and all confusion that hold
sway lead us to question the inexplicable occurrences of psychical life, its
creative and mad procedures. Despite the overfamiliarity of education and
the feeling that we have been there before and so must be able to predict
and control what should happen again, learning is not like that. None of
our normative measures help us encounter the human fact of dependency,
vii
viii Acknowledgments
the questions of love and hate, what learning feels like, why ideas make us
nervous, what the contingencies of emotional life have to do with the ways
in which thinking goes missing, and how one makes sense of discontentment
in and desire for attaching to an education we know nothing about. And
so the paradox this book opens begins with the idea that what we do not
know, as well as what we do not want to know anything about, instructs the
knowledge we thought we already had. Here I try to describe unconscious
education, a character world of teaching and learning that gives permit to
the liberties of psychoanalytic sensitivity and its disquieting imagination. Do
we have time to listen to the human condition of education?
The novelties of practicing and writing from the psychoanalytic and
pedagogical fields form the basis of this present volume’s formulation of
education as our human condition and have affected the style of commu-
nicating this work. While I place in the background my clinical practice in
psychoanalysis, it is the traces of this intimate life world that deeply affect
my sense of pedagogy, the choice of the subject, the objects amassed, and
the flavor of writing. In listening to and associating with how individuals
handle and disperse their matters of love and hate, fragile configurations of
the human condition gradually emerge. There are moving questions of free-
dom of expression and anxieties over its loss. But it is with sorting through
the urgencies of libidinal commitments and its flout of phantasy that bring
us all to matters of the effervescent unconscious. When least expected the
sotto voce phantasies of teaching and learning have sway. So throughout this
volume I ask, how are we to advance theories of pedagogy with a capacious
understanding of learning that recommends emotional life as our significant
resource for thinking anew? May we write psychoanalytically and use the
psychodynamics of pedagogical exchange as our best specimen?
In my view the affecting approach to analyzing the destiny of phantasy
life in the panorama of teaching and learning involves the study of tiny
details that present a meeting of the meant and the unmeant. Details come
to life in throwaway lines, the trailed-off thought, the unexpected reply, the
“I don’t remember,” and the missed encounters and leads me to question
what else occurs between the lines of thought and communication. So it
is that I turn to the analysis of my practices in university teaching and
the difficulties education presents to a psychoanalyst in the classroom. In
the pages that follow I invite your consideration for the idea that a gener-
ous recognition of the vulnerabilities and responsibilities of listening can
create an affectionate and forgiving theory of learning that can stand the
slow work of changing one’s mind with attention to times when frustration,
anxiety, and inhibitions seem to carry us away. I stay in contact with the
throwaway lines.
It is typical when narrating learning matters to note a little warn-
ing, which is another word for anxiety: there is no endpoint to phantasies
Acknowledgments ix
of teaching and learning, and, at times, they present as a vicious cycle
that affect the writing. While much remains unconscious and while depth
psychology may only scratch the surface, should we care to notice the sig-
nificance of the symptomatic acts of quibbling learning and teaching, we
find a great happening. Characters emerge in words and deeds and search
for the genesis of neurosis. They may grate on one’s nerves or be mistaken
for one’s nerves. I include in this mix the character of the psychoanalyst
in the classroom.
I am gratified to know that psychoanalysis and education may travel
together. Many of these chapters began with conference and workshop invi-
tations in Toronto, Vancouver, Istanbul, Jyväskylä, Manchester, London, and
Dublin. I am grateful to friends and colleagues who helped move this proj-
ect along. I thank Dawn Skorczewski, Lewis Kirshner, Jane Miller, Sharon
Sliwinski, Oren Gozlan, Michelle Flax, and the students I teach and learn
from at York University in Toronto. I thank Lucy Angus for assistance with
manuscript preparation and Dr. Beth Bouloukos of State University of New
York Press for her interest in this work.
Most of all, I thank Alice Pitt.
A grant—The Emotional World of Teaching and Learning: A Psycho-
analytic Inquiry—funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research
Council of Canada supported this project. The views, mistakes, and limits
of this study are my own. In this sense, I take seriously Freud’s remark that
behind the scenes, the analyst and professor’s complexes and resistances will
be a part of the work.
Some of the chapters were published in earlier versions and revised for
this book. A shorter version of chapter 3 appeared as “What Is the Use
of Theory?: A Psychoanalytic Discussion,” in Changing English: Studies in
Reading and Culture 19, 1 (2012): 43–56. An earlier version of chapter 4
appeared under the title “The Adolescent Teacher: A Psychoanalytic Note
on Regression in the Helping Professions,” in Journal of Infant, Child, and
Adolescent Psychotherapy 11, 13 (2012): 272–238, and an earlier version
of chapter 5, under the title “On the Madness of Lecturing on Gender:
A Psychoanalytic Discussion,” appeared in Gender and Education 6 (2010):
633–646. And a shorter version of chapter 7 appeared as “That Other Scene
of Pedagogy: A Psychoanalytic Narrative,” in Changing English: Studies in
Reading and Culture 12, 2 (2014): 122–130. I thank Taylor and Francis—
www.tandfonline.com—for granting permission to draw upon and expand
this previously published work.
—Deborah P. Britzman
Toronto
