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For over a decade, Deborah P. Britzman, Distinguished Research Professor of Education at York University, Toronto, has been writing about psychoanalysis and education from the perspective of an award-winning teacher, a teacher of teachers, and an educational researcher. In this most recent work, she adds yet another subject position to the list. She invites us to think about education from the perspective of one who has returned to the classroom at midlife, as a candidate at a psychoanalytic institute. Not surprisingly, analytic training has not changed Britzman's dedication to the exploration of the complex emotional worlds of those involved in education, both teachers and students. As in her previous books, Britzman brings a comprehensive knowledge of psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and literature to her exploration of ideas about education, helping us to think through some of education's most vexing issues (see Britzman 1991, 1998, 2003a, b, 2006). She seeks to discover “why the idea of education has been so scaled down that it can only refer to what has already happened to us and then what needs to happen to inexperienced others” (p. 7).
Because we develop in school, Britzman contends, our concept of education is imbued with ideas of punishment and reward, and grounded in a concept of knowledge as a transmission of information to be regurgitated. To engage in the psychoanalytic view of education that Britzman imagines, we must turn away from this model and embrace radical uncertainty as the basis of learning. Her sources traverse many disciplines and genres, including novels, art, psychoanalytic theory, clinical material, educational theory, psychology, and philosophy. Reading the models of education represented in these genres. Britzman argues for a psychoanalytic education of the kind with which we are familiar—in an analytic institute—as well as a psychoanalytic understanding of all education, regardless of the institutional context. In any setting, Britzma