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Max Cavitch's Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present brings to readers a history of psychoanalysis and education with the invitation to think of the conflicts on offer with particular attention to their ontologies of learning and the ethics of pedagogy. His is a view that emerges from the contentions of education – those founded by psychoanalysis and those experienced by university professors across disciplinary divides. Three dilemmas form the interpretative frame of the book: the repression of sexuality; conflicts between pleasure and reality; and resistance to emotions. To this I would add that our contemporary conflicts in the university mirror the emotional situations and treatments of early childhood, as argued in the early history of child analysis. At least for the Freudian field, adults are never so far away from infancy, childhood, and the family romance as they might wish to be. And these forgotten intimacies, desires, and phantasies may be one reason why psychoanalysis is unwelcome.
Other reasons for unwelcome thoughts on the fate of our erotic beginnings are found in the early history of psychoanalysis. In 1925, and just as conceptions of psychoanalytic pedagogy in Vienna, Berlin, and London were underway, the psychoanalyst and educator Siegfried Bernfeld penned a scathing critique of public education titled, Sisyphus or the Limits of Education. I came across this little book during my early investigations of psychoanalysis with education (Britzman, 1998) and in keeping with Max Cavitch's engagement with the modern university and his plea for a measure of psychoanalytic pedagogy, a brief return to Bernfeld's mythic education along with the early writings by Melanie Klein and other Viennese psychoanalysts, including, of course, Sigmund and Anna Freud, gives first notice to the antimonies of psychoanalysis and education. As it happens,
DEBORAH P. BRITZMAN, Distinguished Research Professor, Emeritus is a Psychoan
DEBORAH P. BRITZMAN, Distinguished Research Professor, Emeritus is a Psychoan