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 book review essay on Deborah Britzman's work, Berman reminds us that Freud referred to education as one of the three “impossible professions,” along with psychoanalysis and governance. Berman highlights Britzman's sensitivity to the unconscious interpersonal and conflictual dynamics in the classroom and shows how Britzman draws on the phenomena of transference and countertransference to make sense of the sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant, resistances to learning. Berman appreciates Britzman's authentically personal voice—intimate yet well contained—as it allows the reader a glimpse of “warm pedagogy,” rooted in an understanding of developmental, psychosocial, and interpersonal influences. Berman writes, “Britzman ends the book by affirming that the quest for humane learning depends upon giving voice to one's emotional life, a challenge because it is suspended between the living and the dead.”
The very personal voice of Britzman's reflections on pedagogy is echoed in the following two reviews of memoirs of life as lived in a psychoanalytic family: Memories of a Chaotic World, reviewed by Devra Adelstein, and The Analyst: A Daughter's Memoir, reviewed by David James Fisher. What can we glean from the memoir of a psychoanalyst's
Anne Adelman, Editor, JAPA Review of Books, 2 Wisconsin Circle, Suite 915, Chevy Chase, MD 20815
Email:
daughter? Braiding together the deeply personal with the profoundly universal, these two books offer a psychoanalytic lens onto the intricacies of loss, love, and desire within families. Spanning the realms of subjectivity and history, they capture the evolution of psychoanalytic thought anchored in the realities of lived experience. These private and sometimes painful memories and musings enrich both our historical understanding and our empathic imagination. Alice Wexler's memoir of growing up with Mi