Deborah Britzman. Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. New York:  SUNY Press, 1998.

Those who know that Freud called psychoanalysis the “impossible profession” may not realize that he included education and government in the same category. Experienced teachers do not have to be reminded of the impossibility of their profession, but there have been surprisingly few psychoanalytic studies of the ways in which education arouses intense resistance in students and teachers. For this reason, Deborah Britzman's Lost Subjects, Contested Objects will be welcome, especially to readers of JPCS. Britzman, an associate professor of Education, Social and Political Thought, and Women's Studies at York University, and the author of Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, explores in her challenging new book how students and teachers confront “difficult knowledge”—that is, knowledge that arouses powerful feelings such as love and hate. As she notes in the Introduction, the “lost subjects in the title refer to the repressed psychic events of teaching and learning, which return to haunt education in the form of its contested objects: as conflicts, as disruptions, as mistakes, and as controversies” (19). These repressed psychic events are rarely acknowledged by educators, yet they nevertheless exist and demand attention. She might also have called her book “Education and Its Discontents,” in light of its emphasis on the unruly side of learning.

Britzman is interested in conceptualizing a theory of education that acknowledges the vicissitudes of love and hate in learning and that affirms the student's passionate attachment to the world. She draws on the work of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, D.W. Winnicott, and Michael Balint as well as contemporary theorists such as Christopher Bollas, Adam Phillips, and Jessica Benjamin. She theorizes that the central dynamic of education is interference, by which she means the teacher's need to challenge the entrenched forces that sustain social and political injustice, such as racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homop