You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In his late essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), Freud famously referred to psychoanalysis as the third of the “impossible” professions; the other two, he adds, “which have been known much longer,” are education and governance. Freud asks why they are impossible professions and then answers his own question: “one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results” (p. 248). Deborah Britzman has expertise in two of these impossible professions. She is Distinguished Research Professor of Education at York University, Toronto, and a psychoanalyst. To add to her credentials, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. For years Britzman has been writing intellectually and emotionally challenging books about how to transform impossible classrooms into sites of creative learning (see, e.g., Britzman 1998, 2009). Her latest book, A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom: On the Human Condition in Education, continues her rigorous explorations, showing how psychoanalysis and pedagogy enable us to understand an “unconscious education.”
As Britzman notes in chapter 1, her book focuses on both the university classroom and clinical practice. She recognizes that while clinical and pedagogical work are not identical, both may be “taken personally,” by which she means that both reveal subjectivity and intersubjectivity. She quotes Christopher Bollas's observation in Forces of Destiny (1991): “It is next to impossible to account for what transpires in a psychoanalysis” (p. 7; quoted on p. 38). As every teacher knows, the same observation may be made about education: it is next to impossible to account for what transpires in a classroom. Beyond these parallel confounders, there also lurks the potential for confusion of roles: a classroom is not a psychoanalytic