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When a patient recently asked “Why did I have so much trouble learning math in school?,” “Negligent teachers!” was the thought that instantly flew into my mind. When this patient was a student, he, like countless others, brought formidable resistances to any educator attempting to work with him. Yet isn't it the teacher's responsibility
to find some way to enable learning to occur? Learning and Education: Psychoanalytic Perspectives corroborates the view that an understanding of how to work with the unconscious processes of transference and resistance is essential to effective teaching: “In the last analysis any educational program rests on the faculty's ability to perceive correctly and to differentiate the ever-changing objective and subjective elements in the teaching situation” (p. 945). The thirty-two articles in this book richly review and examine the psy-chodynamics of education—learning, teaching, and knowing. Most important, the book adds to the slim but growing body of literature documenting the emotional needs of students and the psychody-namic processes in every learning situation, as well as the rationale for psychoanalytic training for teachers.
There is much to be valued in this book for psychoanalysts as well as teachers, for we are all educators concerned with helping our analysands and students develop the courage to feel ignorant—the “courage to try” (p. 143). Wolf, a self psychologist, finding that the sequence “emergence-disruption-restoration” functions in the educational situation just as in the analytic one, emphasizes the Kohutian view that a mirroring self-object gives students the “psychological oxygen” necessary to learn. Schwartz sees preoedipal influences as determining overall psychological structure, and hence the person's view of himself as “capable of learning, or, in pathological circumstances, as one who should not, ought not, or cannot learn” (p. 513). Kaufman posits the importance of the infant's having had an adequate stimulus