Anticipating Education

“In Anticipating Education, Deborah Britzman draws on three decades’ worth of profound reflection on education, seen through the prism of critical and psychoanalytic ideas. The result is a wonderful short book, in which she creates a tapestry of insightful and moving observations on how education can be revolutionised by thought that carries emotion and politics with it. Education emerges from this book as an essential catalyst for living a full life.”

“This book is a marvelous instance of the psychoanalytic truth which good educators must learn to work with, that we all inhabit a precarious life-world that is structured by anticipation and ‘afterwardness’. Deborah Britzman gathers together earlier papers for us, supplementing them with typically thoughtful additional reflections on what is usually un-thought in pedagogical practice. Now we can rediscover how prescient all this is, and grasp the opportunity of benefitting from it before it is too late.”

Ian Parker, Secretary, Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix

“In these exquisitely crafted essays, Deborah P. Britzman personifies her psychoanalytic state of mind, entering what she calls the crypt of curriculum, asking: 'why curriculum at all?' This book is itself the resounding answer. Enlivening knowledge through her thinking, Deborah’s insights invite us inside thought itself, where complicated conversation can commence. If you have—as I do—a shelf in your library devoted to Britzman, be sure to add this one. If space limits you to one Britzman book, make it this one.”

William F. Pinar, Tetsuo Aoki Professor in Curriculum Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

“Dr. Britzman—leading international authority on psychoanalysis and education and practicing psychoanalyst—offers a collection of her work written with intellectual depth, immense virtuosity, and whole heart. Britzman’s repertoire is wide-ranging as she instructs us why we must not forget there is no emotional situation-free zone for education. I can’t think of any contemporary scholar and writer who has more poet in her soul; this volume will be one of the most treasured books in the field of psychoanalysis and education.”

Jenna Min Shim, Professor and Associate Dean in College of Education, University of Wyoming

“Deborah Britzman has written so many beautiful books about pedagogy and psychoanalysis that you may be thinking ‘why this one?’ Hands down, this is Britzman’s best book yet: lyrical, incisive, rigorous, true. The book is ultimately about love as the highest intellectual pursuit, and education as its vehicle. It is a tour de force. I could not put it down. In a world where students are more anxious than ever, and teachers stand at the threshold of burnout, you may be asking yourselves what we possibly can do now. Start here. Read this book.”

Dawn Skorczewski, Research Professor Emerita, Brandeis University

“This erudite and poetic book offers an invitation to return to the source of education, a place of vulnerability, anguish, wonderment and possibility. Beneath the 'mind-numbing stultification' of bureaucratized schooling can be found teachers seeking to embrace childhood subjectivity and difference and release the imagination. This book is for such educators. In its expansiveness and vision, this book builds on the work of Paulo Freire and Maxine Greene to articulate a pedagogy of the imagination. Britzman illustrates the beautiful complementarity of psychoanalysis and critical educational theory in articulating a pedagogy of interiority, social justice, and creative possibility that so many educators hunger for.”

Michael O’Loughlin, Adelphi University, New York

Acknowledgments

Prelude: Late Education

Part I: Phantasies Of Education

Chapter 1
A Note On Transference To Reading

Chapter 2
On Not Being Able To Write

Chapter 3
The Homoerotic Turn

Chapter 4
Teacher Education In The Confusion Of Our Times

Part II: Difficult Knowledge

Chapter 5
On Some Psychical Consequences of AIDS Education

Chapter 6
The Death Of Curriculum?

Chapter 7
The Fate Of Being A Stranger

Part III: Transforming Subjects

Chapter 8
Public Education As States Of Mind

Chapter 9
‘Each To Each’ And The Equality Of Vulnerability

Chapter 10
Notes On The Poetics Of Supervision

Chapter 11
Some Psychoanalytic Observations On Ordinary, Quiet, And Painful Resistance

Part IV: Psychoanalysis With Pedagogy

Chapter 12
‘Even In Cambridge’

Chapter 13
What Is Emotional About Our Emotional Situation?

Chapter 14
On Disquieting Imagination, Indeterminacy, Aesthetic Conflicts, And Grouch Days

About The Author
Index of Selected Concepts For Imagining Pedagogy With Psychoanalysis

NOTE: Table of contents subject to change up to final publication date.

Deborah Britzman

Deborah P. Britzman is Distinguished Research Professor at York University in Toronto, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a working psychoanalyst. Known for her work in critical pedagogy and psychoanalysis, Britzman is the author of nine books, the most recent of which include A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom; Freud and Education; and Melanie Klein: Early Childhood, Play and the Question of Freedom.