When History Returns: Psychoanalytic Quests for Humane Learning. By Deborah P. Britzman. Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2024,  194 pp., $99 hardcover. DOI:

In his late essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud (1937) famously referred to psychoanalysis as the third of the “impossible” professions; the other two, he adds, “which have been known much longer” (p. 248), are education and governance. Freud asks why they are impossible professions and then answers his own question: “one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfactory results” (p. 248). Experienced teachers do not need to be reminded of the impossibility of their profession. Still, there have been surprisingly few psychoanalytic scholars who have explored the ways in which education arouses intense resistance in students and teachers alike. For this reason, Deborah P. Britzman's work has been noteworthy.

Britzman is a member of two of these impossible professions. She is the York Research Chair in Pedagogy and Psycho-Social Transformation, Distinguished Research Professor of Education, Emeritus, 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 challenging books about how to transform impossible classrooms into sites of creative learning. She is one of the leading theorists in the area of education, and her commitment to Freud has never wavered.

Britzman began her career as a high school English teacher in an alternative public school. There is little that is psychoanalytic in her first book, Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach (Britzman, 1991). Britzman began writing the book in the early 1980s, and the first

edition appeared in 1991. Practice Makes Practice is not psychoanalytic; only one reference to Sigmund Freud appears, though the introduction to the revised edition, published in 2003, reveals her gradual embracing of psychoanalytic theory. It was only during her fourth year of college teaching, according