Abstract
In the years since Deborah Britzman has been writing about psychoanalysis and education, her readers have been treated to new perceptions on a topic that is at once familiar to all (the universalism of learning) and less expected (education as the human internalization of history). With this new book, Britzman, a psychoanalyst and professor emeritus at York University, draws on a range of psychoanalytic vocabularies and frameworks with which she plumbs psychological depths of this dual experience, and she focuses on the absorption of history as a deeply emotional process of being, feeling, and even becoming the human beings who we are.
At once a meditation on learning (how history permeates pedagogy), and a psychoanalytic inquiry into the mechanisms of memory, Britzman's investigation explores the ways in which major theorists from Sigmund Freud to Melanie Klein have handled profound questions about language, human connection, transference, and time. Representation, identity, symbolization, and otherness - these are just a few of the elements which she has selected to deconstruct the impact of history within what Freud called the “Umwelt” (environment) of education. In Chapter 1 for instance, Freud's struggle to advance a unifying model of education, Britzman explains, was invariably impeded by his sense of the contradiction between “the imaginary of learning from the accrual of knowledge” and “the subject's capacity for tolerating the uncertainties of life, loss, separation, and working through” (p. 8). Psychoanalysis is, in effect, education in that it offers ways of thinking, listening, and inquiring. Much like the anxiety summoned by an unexpected event in daily life, or a startling image in a dream, education is resisted by the history it evokes.
Psychoanalytic theorists have long chronicled the many ways which history appears in human thought, consciously or not. From Melanie Klein to Wilfred Bion to Jean Laplanche, these and other psychoanalytic writers have approached learning, or as Britzman calls it, “situations of learning,” as instances of the shifting relationship between the self and society shaded by culturally-determined concepts of otherness. Chapter 2 examines four of these nuanced situations - emotional, anthropological, transference, and ethical - while also showing that, perhaps surprisingly, human consciousness is more thoroughly embedded in the Umwelt, the environment or terrain of education, than in the other three situations. Probing the function and form of this Umwelt more deeply, Chapter 3 focuses on the work of Theodor Adorno, the mid-twentieth century cultural critic who thought about education's potential to recapture the ongoing traces of history in mental life. A survivor of Nazi violence, Adorno posits that pedagogy must help people survive destruction. “The questions Adorno posed for education,” Britzman writes, “concern the unconscious depths of its affective influence on character formation and how this may be known” (p. 35). The complicated juxtaposition of our inside world with our outside world is framed, in Chapter 4, as a depression/oppression dialectic presented in the writings of Melanie Klein and Paolo Freire. But where Freire emphasizes the need to build social bonds, both he and Klein suggest that individual development requires ongoing change in the educational situation: under these conditions, psychoanalytic thinking allows depression to dialogue with injustice while oppression contends with resistance.
“At its most elemental level,” writes Britzman, “misogyny is a revolt against life itself” (p. 65). Misogyny is arguably the quintessential experience of our time and yet an oddity. When a French court “sentenced Mr. Pelicot to 20 years after he admitted to drugging and raping his wife, Gisèle, for nearly a decade, and inviting strangers to join him,” 1 the verdict was greeted as an unprecedented triumph of feminism. Was it? Delving into a psychoanalytic understanding of our era's political and social violence as fuel for misogyny, Chapter 5 presents a range of primary themes (feminism, decolonization, queer theory, critical race theory, and transsexuality) that mark how the history of misogyny is repressed within the educational situation. Nonetheless, repression need not be fatal: free association can be our most powerful force as we try to stop the merciless compulsion to make history meaningless. Second most powerful is our “Nebenmensch,” the entity closest to our self, the being who (or that) reflects back to us what we think and feel. To illustrate how history flows through this deep relationship, Britzman assesses how anxiety can affect the transference within a therapist-patient friendship. Melanie Klein's case study of her own Nebenmensch, for example, shows how both the child patient and his analyst draw on their connection to pursue the kind of “humane learning” where “children not only create the analyst they can bear but are also analysts in the making” (p. 92).
While ideas about education recede and reappear in the course of our histories, with this book, Deborah Britzman makes of psychoanalysis an education all its own. As in her previous work, her ability to visualize the complexity of our inner and outer selves, and the role played by pedagogy therein, draws on a modern feminist sensibility. Without sidestepping nor simplifying worldly problems, she offers her readers new insights into the human experience: from the symbolization put forth by dream images to the residue of unresolved social traumas, she shows that that history fuses psychoanalysis and education, forming the unifying undercurrent that lies beneath our experience of everyday reality.
