Freud And Education

The concept of education—its dangers and promises and its illusions and revelations—threads throughout Sigmund Freud’s body of work. This introductory volume by psychoanalytic authority, Deborah P. Britzman, explores key controversies of education through a Freudian approach. It defines how fundamental Freudian concepts such as the psychical apparatus, the drives, the unconscious, the development of morality, and transference have changed throughout Freud’s oeuvre. An ideal text for courses in education studies, human development, and curriculum studies, Freud and Education concludes with new Freudian-influenced approaches to the old dilemmas of educational research, theory, and practice.

Examining the work of Lacan and Freud, Cho argues that a theory of pedagogy is already embedded within psychoanalysis. Psychopedagogy is the name given to this embedded theory. Through a discussion of key psychoanalytic concepts, as well as a variety of other topics, Cho develops the contours of psychopedagogy.

All areas of education policy and practice are driven by unconscious investments in ignorance, or idealised images of transformation of the individual, society and economy. The promise of fulfilment and associated threats of disappointment or destruction tend to dominate conscious accounts of education. Other more vulnerable or unspeakable aspects of our engagements with education are covered over when we account for learning, and justify teaching as professionals, policy makers and researchers; but they leak out in slips, lapses, emphasis, paradox and contradiction. Freud’s account of resistance and repetition; Lacan’s theorisation of the role of language and desire; and Zizek’s elaboration of these ideas in a theory of ideology and enjoyment – all provide tools for exploring the vulnerable, uncomfortable and often surprising other side of education: the hidden, unconscious and unspoken desires that we invest in educational institutions and practices. This collection offers glimpses of this other side of education produced in empirical studies using a variety of methodological approaches: practice-based theoretical speculation, policy analysis, ethnography, interviews and free associative methods, as well as ideological critique of the field of critical educational practice and research. The book foregrounds political and unconscious aspects of investments in the fields of education and educational research. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor and Francis journals.

Anna Freud was the sixth and last child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. Born in Vienna, she followed the path of her father and contributed to the newly born field of psychoanalysis. She is considered to be one of the founders of psychoanalytic child psychology. 'Psychoanalysis For Teachers And Parents' is written in a clear understandable fashion. The book outlines the basic findings of psychoanalysis and their implications for the understanding, care, and education of young children. Titles of the lectures are Infantile Amnesia and the Oedipus Complex; The Infantile Instinct-Life; The Latency Period; and The Relation Between Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy.

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.

In After-Education Deborah P. Britzman raises the startling question, What is education that it should give us such trouble? She explores a series of historic and contemporary psychoanalytic arguments over the nature of reality and fantasy for thinking through the force and history of education. Drawing from the theories of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, she analyzes experiences of difficult knowledge, pedagogy, group psychology, theory, and questions of loneliness in learning education. Throughout the book, education appears and is transformed in its various guises: as a nervous condition, as social relation, as authority, as psychological knowledge, as quality of psychical reality, as fact of natality, as the thing between teachers and students, as an institution, and as a play between reality and fantasy.