Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning

A study of love and hate in learning and an argument for why educators might begin with consideration of these psychical dynamics when interpreting the conflictive dreams of education.

This book argues for education's reconsideration of what psychoanalytic theories of love and hate might mean to the design of learning and pedagogy. Britzman sets in tension three perspectives: studies of education, studies in psychoanalysis, and studies of ethics to consider how larger social and cultural histories live in the small history of the subject. Britzman casts her net widely to consider questions of sex education, the work of Anna Freud in reencountering the Diary of Anne Frank, reading practices in pedagogy, anti-racist pedagogy and the question of love, and the arguments between education and psychoanalysis.

Deborah P. Britzman is Associate Professor of Education, Social and Political Thought, and Women's Studies at York University. She is author of Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, also published by SUNY Press.