Relational Psychoanalysis at the Heart of Teaching and Learning: How and Why It Matters

This book introduces the insights of contemporary relational psychoanalysis to educational thought and uses them as the foundation for a comprehensive model for understanding and informing teaching and learning practice. The model integrates what we know about conscious thought, motivation, and the physical body and translates these understandings in ways that are meaningful and relevant to the circumstances of practicing teachers, school leaders, and teachers of teachers. It will be of great interest to them and to those educational scholars whose attentions turn to the exigencies of the current era.

Echoing calls for inclusivity, the book stands against admonishing anyone on the right way to be a person. Instead it emphasises understanding and, in understanding, practicing well. Readers will gain a deeper appreciation of the nature of sense-making and awareness and of the practical implications of cognition as embodied, life forms as non-linear dynamic systems, and relationships as core to human development and classroom life.

It was Einstein who, in a letter to Freud, once asked for an educational solution to the menace of war. Today’s urgencies – of nations divided, diminishing planetary resources, and certain ecological disasters – press for wisdom beyond our collective habit. Thankfully the once-elusive mysteries of life, mind, learning, and learning systems now yield in ways to help shape answers to Einstein’s question. Relational psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, educational theorists, teachers, and those who work with them will be intrigued by the convergences and heartened at the possibilities.

Lissa D’Amour recently retired from the Faculty of Education, University of Calgary. Her 15 years working with prospective and practicing teachers followed upon and benefited from 25 years of school-teaching success in a variety of everyday contexts, from pre-kindergarten through grade 12. Today, as an independent scholar, Lissa continues to work at bringing relational psychoanalytic understanding into curriculum theory and, through curriculum theory, into the lived experiences and practical lives of teachers and their students.