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Psychoanalysis and Education: Minding a Gap

Editor : Alan Bainbridge, Editor : Linden West

Reviews and Endorsements

'Education continues to be a struggle to unite heart and brain, to enthuse as well as to inform, and to find ways to ensure that learners have the intellectual skills and emotional capacities to deal creatively with their world. Psychoanalysis and Education is a major new collection that offers a grounded and thoughtful, yet also polemical, account of how psychoanalysis can facilitate this project. The liveliness and sophistication of the book will make it an important landmark for a renewed critical educational practice.'
- Stephen Frosh, Professor of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London

'The capacious nature of education that Freud admitted to his theories is affected by the dynamic unconscious. It brings the invitation to go behind the scenes of teaching and learning as signifying an emotional situation that is difficult to know. This superb collection of international authors opens the dream work of education to its "other scene" and presents novel research that enlivens the contemporary field of psychoanalysis and education. Through case studies, debates on clinical valence, and diverse theoretical discussions, readers meet creative new approaches to old teaching and learning conflicts.'
- Deborah Britzman, Distinguished Research Professor, psychoanalyst and author of Freud and Education

'With the resurgence of educational interest in matters of affect, desire, and the psychic dynamics of learning and teaching, this volume is timely. Psychoanalytic perspectives have been ignored or dismissed in mainstream educational writings for much too long. Alan Bainbridge and Linden West offer here a remarkable collection of essays revealing what are so often invisible in educational encounters: the complex relational dynamics - beyond consciousness - involved in "particular becomings".'
- Tara Fenwick, University of Stirling

'For the twenty years I have been involved in University-led initial and continuing teacher education, I have been a proponent of reflective practice. However, I have been bamboozled by student questions such as, "What is reflection?", "Reflect about what?", and "How can I learn to reflect?". This book provides some answers. Learning is uncomfortable, it challenges one's own existing knowledge, experience, and assumptions. The authors point out that a psychoanalytic approach is not equivalent to therapy - it is about uncovering the barriers to learning borne from personal experience, socio-cultural influences, pre-determined expectations, and the challenges of learning to self-perception. It is not a quick read - it is demanding on concentration, and is at times challenging, but has the potential to influence education practices in the future.'
- Professor Kit Field, Dean of the School for Education Futures, University of Wolverhampton