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In the preface to Deborah Britzman's new book, she traces the ‘reverie’ of an imaginary walk, noting its movements and logics being like that of a dream. To imagine oneself walking is to dream, interpret, read, think, relate and learn, Britzman says (p. xvii). She states that the book that follows will echo this walking structure. As a practising psychoanalyst, educator and theorist, Britzman poses a formal arrangement that synthesizes the walks of life she treads, not in some neat arrangement, but through condensation. In this sense, When History Returns remains strange and enigmatic throughout in style and form. Dreams as a ‘nocturnal transference to the day's residues’ (p. 121) capture the affect of reading it. It is composed of encounters, associations and fragments – the stuff of the psychoanalyst and, perhaps, the educator.
From the outset, Britzman's book takes history not as an educational discipline but as temporality. This is not a psychoanalytic look at ‘how to teach difficult topics from history’, for example, though even those seeking such everyday take-aways would find something here. Psychoanalysis, however, has always treated temporality as non-linear, retroactive and contradictory. As such, Britzman's thesis for the book summons a classically Freudian imperative:
We turn to history in times of facing the presence of crisis and crisis animates what is left unresolved, including how the conflicts of history can be acknowledged and worked through. (p. xi)
‘Working through’ describes this book best. The chapters contained within it are, loosely, a working through of the movements of returns through the texts of ‘literature, social thought, fine letters, journalism, memoirs, and art’ (p. xi) and through the pedagogical modes of these texts.
The encounters throughout the book interweave numerous themes, images and thinkers. The book begins chronologically with Freud. Britzman treads through the Freudian oeuvre to uncover the pedagogical implications of his wo