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The Very Thought of Education
THE VERY THOUGHT
OF EDUCATION
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE IMPOSSIBLE PROFESSIONS
Deborah P. Britzman
s t a t e u n i v e r s i t y o f n e w y o r k p r e s s
Published by
State University of New York Press
Albany
© 2009 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Britzman, Deborah P., 1952–
The very thought of education : psychoanalysis and the impossible
professions / Deborah P. Britzman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-2645-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Learning, Psychology of. 2. Psychoanalysis and education.
I. Title.
BF318.B787 2009
370.15—dc22 2008042785
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
1 The Very Thought 1
2 Uneven Development 27
3 Reading 45
4 Psychology 61
5 Countertransference 81
6 Transference People 103
7 The Impossible Professions 127
Notes 149
References 153
Index 163
v
Preface
Everything “started” when I had nothing more to say, when I no
longer knew where to end or how to end. At that moment, what
I had recounted before came back, but in a way that was entirely
other, in a discontinuous way, in different forms (memories,
dreams, slips, repetitions), or it never came back. I understood
that I had tried, by telling the story of “my life,” not to recount
it—it is too much for words—but to master it. I had been at once
foolish and unfaithful.
—Sarah Kofman, “ ‘My Life’ and Psychoanalysis”
Freud’s (1900) book of dreams handed psychoanalysts more than a few clues
as to the utter diffi culty of undergoing its strange education. He suggested
that even in our sleep there is work to be done and in waking life dream work
may well be the transfer point for our bungled actions, slips, jokes, misread-
ing, wild thoughts, and memories. Through insisting that the dream is both
other to conscious life and a commentary on it, by lifting the curtain of his
own dream theater to present what is unfaithful, foolish, and inadmissible in
rational life, by reading between these lines and even fi nding that which is not
there at all, by remembering the forgotten as signifying remnants of missed
meaning, and so, by starting with what is most unintentional, Freud asked
those learning psychoanalysis to become students of their ignorance. We are
asked to take the side of the wish for this other world by associating with it
and greeting this curiosity with warm regard. Kofman’s (2007b) fragment
of her analysis struggles with another sense of what psychoanalysis feels like:
without reason, bereft words return the speaker’s agony.
One hundred years later, many analysts think of Freud’s (1900) chapter six,
“The Dream Work,” as the text’s navel, the bodily excess that stands for what
can never happen again. Having to be born will signify our unrepresentable
vii
viii PREFACE
beginning, and our relation to the other. It will be felt as what Kofman
describes as “too much for words.” Yet if the psychoanalyst may only ask for
what is uncertain in words—putting unthinkable things into them and call-
ing into speech that which is not speech—the request creates more than words
can say. The paradox of dreams, and thus of psychoanalysis, is that words
return a foreign self; however eloquent, wild, or harsh these words feel, they
turn the speaker over to what is most enigmatic, most unresolved, and perhaps
irresolvable in her or his life.
From the perspective of what cannot be consciously noticed but contin-
ues to impress, the dream work compresses, distorts, displaces, reverses, frag-
ments, and envisages the day’s residues with our unfi lled wishes. It plays havoc
with beginning language, as if each night we learn words for the fi rst time.
Dreams are utterly literal, in the sense that they say what they mean without
meaning what they say. They arrange what Freud (1900) noticed as “a thing
that is capable of being represented” (340) and, in this way, propose our best sug-
gestions. Yet dreams are ambiguous and with this claim Freud will tell us that
the method of their interpretation will suffer from the radical indeterminacy
of its subject and object, that the wishes dreams somehow create cannot be
met with the analyst’s suggestion of how to think of them. Any interpretation
will be speculative and uncertain (Kohon 1986b). In the case of dreams and
in the case of education, considerations of representability will only mean
that something unknown is being presented. And dreams, Freud writes,
“are not made with the intention of being understood” (341). This radical condition
impresses the form, style, and force of both the method of dreams and their
interpretation. In this transference, both analyst and analysand are affected.
Freud was telling us that, just as with the dream work, the psychoanalyst,
along with the analysand, would be caught between not knowing and the
desire to know, and by creating a transfer of love into knowledge this con-
fl ict begins their strange education. The nature of this education, however, is
not easy to convey because it exists and does not exist at the same time. This
unusual tendency places psychoanalysis in the defenseless position of inviting
uncertainty and gambling with nonsense without losing its patience. At the
very least, and like the dream, psychoanalysis provides a frame to consider our
uncertainty by working through the order of anxiety that destroys our capacity
to think. The central theme of The Very Thought of Education begins with the
idea that, like the dream, education requires association, interpretation, and
a narrative capable of bringing to awareness, for further construction, things
that are farthest from the mind. And whatever education is dedicated to, all
education suffers a radical fate of indeterminacy. The approach that can best
