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Deborah Britzman, Distinguished Research Professor in Education at York University in Toronto, and productive scholar at the intersection of education and psychoanalysis, creatively deepens and broadens our understanding of both fields in her most recent book, The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions. The topic of psychoanalytic education is often written about in terms of various training paradigms (Kernberg, 2000; Levy, 2009; Wallerstein, 2007), problems of institute life (Kernberg 1996), or the design of curricula (Rees, 2007). Inviting the reader into a totally different realm of reflection about the enterprise of education, Britzman's book is not a summary of previous discussions or controversies about psychoanalytic education. Rather, she poses interesting and thought-provoking questions about our entire experience of education and the ways our learning and teaching are inhabited by childhood experiences, various transferences and countertransferences to teaching and being taught, and the affects of love and hate. In her opening statement Britzman asserts that we have a transference to the history of our education and that this suffuses all our interactions in the classroom and beyond, as our education is indeed interminable. Put succinctly, this book explores Britzman's observation that: “Education is our transference playground of love and hate” (p. 131).
Further complicating educational practices is that the subterranean psychic history of our education often resists conscious reflection, making teaching and learning all the more fraught with unmetabolized bits of prior experience. Britzman uses both her first vocation, Distinguished Professor in Education, and her more recent foray into psychoanalytic education as a candidate in training, to explore how disavowed affects haunt the landscape of education. Her bifocal perspective, rich in knowledge from both disciplines, illuminates the history of psychoanalysis in its clin