The Learning Relationship: Psychoanalytic Thinking in Education

This book offers a psychoanalytic perspective on learning and teaching and on many of the issues which preoccupy those who work in educational institutions. It looks at the origins of learning in childrens early relationships and at factors which help and hinder the educational process in later childhood and adolescence. Amongst the topics addressed in the book are the significance of play and playfulness, the impact of change, separation, times of transition, bereavement, bullying and racism. The author has aimed to set well-established psychoanalytic ideas about learning within the context of current educational practice and to look at the teachers experience alongside that of the students.

This volume is a collection of papers, each of which is a version of a lecture previously given as part of the Tavistock course, "Emotional Factors in Learning and Teaching; counselling aspects in education". The course, which is for teachers and others working in educational settings, has been running for more than thirty years. It began as a collaboration between Martha Harris, then Head of the Child Psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic and her husband, Roland Harris, an educationalist and writer. This partnership between clinical thinking and expertise in educational theory and practice continues to the present day, with child psychotherapists and educationists working closely together.

The ideas underpinning the course were first elaborated by Isca Saltzberger Wittenberg, Gianna Henry and Elsie Osborne in 1983 in The Emotional Experience of Learning and Teaching, a book which remains a valued, core text. This new volume represents an attempt to revisit some of the same themes and to set the applied psychoanalytic thinking in the current educational context.