Learning And Education: Psychoanalytic Perspectives.: Edited by Kay Field, Bertram J. Cohler, and Glorye Wool. Madison, CT: Int. Univ. Press, 1989, 1016 pp., $72.50.

Psychoanalysis and early childhood education have had a long and close relationship. Educators, since the 1930's, have been interested in applying psychoanalytic theory both to the training of teachers and to specific educational programs in the classrooms, while analysts have been interested in studying development, learning theory, and the nature of the teacher-pupil relationship in the classroom. These early efforts also included “wild” applications of poorly understood psychoanalytic concepts. The progressive school movement in the United States suffered many of these misapplications of psychoanalytic ideas.

The Teacher Education Program of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago has brought careful study and thought to this arena, and in 1982 celebrated the 50th Anniversary of Psychoanalysis in Chicago with a conference entitled “The World of Learning: From Motive to Meaning.” This volume grows out of that conference and includes a broad range of papers that explore the boundary between psychoanalysis and education. While there is no unified theoretical ground for the volume, it focuses on theoretical and historical linkages, the contribution of psychoanalytic theory to the development of models for understanding development and learning, specific applications of the psychoanalytic model to problems in early education, and contributions to an understanding of the learning process in the context of the relationship between teacher and student with a focus on the experience of the teacher. The papers range widely from purely theoretical discussions to practical-minded clinical studies that include specific case examples.

Betram Cohler reviews the long history of the relationship of psychoanalysis to the study of learning and education, and emphasizes the problem of the conflict between the societal value on the product of education as contrasted with the process-oriented nature of the approaches in this volume. The complexity of social problems in