Deborah Britzman | York University (original) (raw)
Papers by Deborah Britzman
Educational studies, 1989
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (JAAACS), 2013
When History Returns, 2024
https://sunypress.edu/Books/W/When-History-Returns When History Returns brings together psychoana... more https://sunypress.edu/Books/W/When-History-Returns
When History Returns brings together psychoanalytic theories of learning with the antinomies of social strife. From a psychoanalytic perspective, history returns through transitional scenes of inheriting a past one could not make, experiencing a present affected by what came before, and facing a future one can neither know nor predict. Taking such scenes as the subject of education, Deborah P. Britzman provides new approaches and vocabulary for conceptualizing experience and understanding, as expressed in psychoanalysis, literature, film, clinical case studies, and warm pedagogy. Britzman argues that novel quests for humane responsibility take hold in the fallout of understanding, in the feel of history, in imaginative dialogues and missed encounters, and in searches for friendship, belonging, and affiliation. Each chapter charts these quests in contemporary education, carrying readers into the heart of learning and the emotional situations that urge the transitions of difficult knowledge into care for thinking and the questions that follow
Provides a qualitative portrait of one student teacher\u27s concept of self-identity
Estilos da Clínica, 2002
Vez por outra, uma figura curiosa escapa do arquivo psicanalítico 2. Pontalis (1981, p.95) chama ... more Vez por outra, uma figura curiosa escapa do arquivo psicanalítico 2. Pontalis (1981, p.95) chama essa figura sinistra (Unheimlich) de "a criançaquestão". Ele produz essa metáfora a partir da leitura do primeiro e estranhíssimo relato de Melanie Klein (1921) da análise de seu filho de cinco anos, no qual ela leva a cabo o que era chamado na época de uma "educação psicanalítica". Antes de adentrar na essência dessa metáfora, vale, contudo, Professora de Educação e diretora do programa de pós-graduação em Pensamento Político e Social da York University no Canadá.
Educação Unisinos, Aug 22, 2012
Encontros com a adolescência e a sua busca de verdade, beleza e reflexão podem servir de arcabouç... more Encontros com a adolescência e a sua busca de verdade, beleza e reflexão podem servir de arcabouço psicanalítico no estudo da formação educacional nas profissões assistenciais. Um conflito significativo reside na condição do conhecimento profissional em relação à vida psíquica, que tende a ser expresso como uma alienação entre a teoria do desenvolvimento e a pedagogia. Trato meu curso de graduação na área de formação de professores, The Adolescent and the Teacher [A Adolescente e a Professora] como um estudo de caso psicanalítico sobre o processo de formação de adultos que cresceram dentro do sistema escolar e para lá retornam a fim de atuar profissionalmente. Este artigo focaliza questões na formação de professores-uma área raramente reconhecida como algo que afeta o imaginário da psicologia educacional, do aconselhamento e do trabalho social-, bem como discussões sobre a natureza da adolescência, e apresenta uma análise das profissões impossíveis dedicadas à educação. A discussão se alicerça na ideia psicanalítica de que adultos que atuam em escolas estão sujeitos à sua adolescência, a conjuntos elementares de conflitos internos, fantasias e defesas que se reconfiguram no conhecimento profissional na forma de exigências de certeza e de uma crença na noção de que o aprendizado constitui a tônica do conflito em vez de ser apenas um representante dele. A partir da noção de "síndrome adolescente da idealidade", proposta por Julia Kristeva (2007), o artigo especula a vida psíquica como a nossa relação mais radical entre o self e o outro. Contudo, neste encontro, um grão de alienação é introduzido nas reações a conflitos na estrutura da escolarização, nas relações self/outro e na articulação do conhecimento profissional, estendendo-se até a confusão entre as fantasias de uma profissão e os imperativos cotidianos de uma atuação dentro dos limites da certeza.
Sex Education, Aug 1, 2010
Analyzes the theories and practices that structure experience in learning to teach (fragmented ex... more Analyzes the theories and practices that structure experience in learning to teach (fragmented experience, compartmentalization of knowledge, pedagogy and content, knowledge and interest, theory and practice, socialization to subjectivity)
Describes agency and identity in teaching from a critical perspective
Educational studies, Dec 1, 1994
... ed., Windows on Japanese Education (1 99 1). The seventy-four documents included here from Am... more ... ed., Windows on Japanese Education (1 99 1). The seventy-four documents included here from American and Japanese governmental and nongovernmental sources, often available because of the largess of scholars of Japanese education like the late Ronald S. Anderson ...
Teaching Education, Sep 1, 1998
Springer eBooks, 2016
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Revista De Educacion, Oct 17, 2016
Changing English, Dec 1, 2009
Why would anyone want to become a teacher? What at first glance feels like a test question will t... more Why would anyone want to become a teacher? What at first glance feels like a test question will turn out to become a startling way to conceptualise the poetics of supervision. The nature of this creativity, however, involves interpreting conscious and unconscious obstacles and inhibitions in teacher education that confine both this question and the supervisor’s work to the supposed realism of classroom observation. This will take us into a forgotten history of learning for love and having to grow up in the classrooms that one returns to as an adult. Bringing the past to bear upon the confines of the present will be one way to transform an understanding of experience in supervision into a philosophical problem of value and desire, akin to what the programme of abstract art gives us over to think: an encounter with what is evocative in the assemblage of material, in lines of force and resistance, in the play of light and darkness, and in the fading away of objects. These dynamics belong to being in language, where the cast of a self’s shadow falls into the epic of words. If the supervisory relationship can be imagined as an experiment in the field of speech, a new discussion on the contentious problem of learning can be made from the vantage of listening to and elaborating the language of teaching. Then, when the subject represents her or his practices to another, supervision will find itself wandering into the thicket of what is most enigmatic in the desire to become a speaking subject. Yet when asked why would anyone want to become a teacher, beginners repeat or feel that they must repeat stock answers to be intelligible to whomever they imagine the questioner to represent. Replies go something like this: I want to become a teacher because I care about children or love my subject area that has been ruined by others; I feel the call to be helpful to society and to the future; I wish to emulate a past teacher who helped me and be a role model to others who have none; I need to change the educational establishment because of my own (bad or good) experience as a student. Supervisors are rarely asked why they want to become a supervisor, although they, too, may say they supervise only to improve practices, share their experience and help others avoid what has already happened to them. But this reduces everyone to needs waiting to be met, spoken about rather than urged to speak. It is as if, in the effort to distinguish firmly good from bad and success from failure, the profession must guarantee itself before the time of understanding. In other words, the profession is caught in the trap of repeating mantras of teaching without remembering or working through childhood fantasies, anxieties and defences made from being educated while
Punctum Books, May 23, 2016
Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies, Oct 11, 2012
Educational studies, 1989
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (JAAACS), 2013
When History Returns, 2024
https://sunypress.edu/Books/W/When-History-Returns When History Returns brings together psychoana... more https://sunypress.edu/Books/W/When-History-Returns
When History Returns brings together psychoanalytic theories of learning with the antinomies of social strife. From a psychoanalytic perspective, history returns through transitional scenes of inheriting a past one could not make, experiencing a present affected by what came before, and facing a future one can neither know nor predict. Taking such scenes as the subject of education, Deborah P. Britzman provides new approaches and vocabulary for conceptualizing experience and understanding, as expressed in psychoanalysis, literature, film, clinical case studies, and warm pedagogy. Britzman argues that novel quests for humane responsibility take hold in the fallout of understanding, in the feel of history, in imaginative dialogues and missed encounters, and in searches for friendship, belonging, and affiliation. Each chapter charts these quests in contemporary education, carrying readers into the heart of learning and the emotional situations that urge the transitions of difficult knowledge into care for thinking and the questions that follow
Provides a qualitative portrait of one student teacher\u27s concept of self-identity
Estilos da Clínica, 2002
Vez por outra, uma figura curiosa escapa do arquivo psicanalítico 2. Pontalis (1981, p.95) chama ... more Vez por outra, uma figura curiosa escapa do arquivo psicanalítico 2. Pontalis (1981, p.95) chama essa figura sinistra (Unheimlich) de "a criançaquestão". Ele produz essa metáfora a partir da leitura do primeiro e estranhíssimo relato de Melanie Klein (1921) da análise de seu filho de cinco anos, no qual ela leva a cabo o que era chamado na época de uma "educação psicanalítica". Antes de adentrar na essência dessa metáfora, vale, contudo, Professora de Educação e diretora do programa de pós-graduação em Pensamento Político e Social da York University no Canadá.
Educação Unisinos, Aug 22, 2012
Encontros com a adolescência e a sua busca de verdade, beleza e reflexão podem servir de arcabouç... more Encontros com a adolescência e a sua busca de verdade, beleza e reflexão podem servir de arcabouço psicanalítico no estudo da formação educacional nas profissões assistenciais. Um conflito significativo reside na condição do conhecimento profissional em relação à vida psíquica, que tende a ser expresso como uma alienação entre a teoria do desenvolvimento e a pedagogia. Trato meu curso de graduação na área de formação de professores, The Adolescent and the Teacher [A Adolescente e a Professora] como um estudo de caso psicanalítico sobre o processo de formação de adultos que cresceram dentro do sistema escolar e para lá retornam a fim de atuar profissionalmente. Este artigo focaliza questões na formação de professores-uma área raramente reconhecida como algo que afeta o imaginário da psicologia educacional, do aconselhamento e do trabalho social-, bem como discussões sobre a natureza da adolescência, e apresenta uma análise das profissões impossíveis dedicadas à educação. A discussão se alicerça na ideia psicanalítica de que adultos que atuam em escolas estão sujeitos à sua adolescência, a conjuntos elementares de conflitos internos, fantasias e defesas que se reconfiguram no conhecimento profissional na forma de exigências de certeza e de uma crença na noção de que o aprendizado constitui a tônica do conflito em vez de ser apenas um representante dele. A partir da noção de "síndrome adolescente da idealidade", proposta por Julia Kristeva (2007), o artigo especula a vida psíquica como a nossa relação mais radical entre o self e o outro. Contudo, neste encontro, um grão de alienação é introduzido nas reações a conflitos na estrutura da escolarização, nas relações self/outro e na articulação do conhecimento profissional, estendendo-se até a confusão entre as fantasias de uma profissão e os imperativos cotidianos de uma atuação dentro dos limites da certeza.
Sex Education, Aug 1, 2010
Analyzes the theories and practices that structure experience in learning to teach (fragmented ex... more Analyzes the theories and practices that structure experience in learning to teach (fragmented experience, compartmentalization of knowledge, pedagogy and content, knowledge and interest, theory and practice, socialization to subjectivity)
Describes agency and identity in teaching from a critical perspective
Educational studies, Dec 1, 1994
... ed., Windows on Japanese Education (1 99 1). The seventy-four documents included here from Am... more ... ed., Windows on Japanese Education (1 99 1). The seventy-four documents included here from American and Japanese governmental and nongovernmental sources, often available because of the largess of scholars of Japanese education like the late Ronald S. Anderson ...
Teaching Education, Sep 1, 1998
Springer eBooks, 2016
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Revista De Educacion, Oct 17, 2016
Changing English, Dec 1, 2009
Why would anyone want to become a teacher? What at first glance feels like a test question will t... more Why would anyone want to become a teacher? What at first glance feels like a test question will turn out to become a startling way to conceptualise the poetics of supervision. The nature of this creativity, however, involves interpreting conscious and unconscious obstacles and inhibitions in teacher education that confine both this question and the supervisor’s work to the supposed realism of classroom observation. This will take us into a forgotten history of learning for love and having to grow up in the classrooms that one returns to as an adult. Bringing the past to bear upon the confines of the present will be one way to transform an understanding of experience in supervision into a philosophical problem of value and desire, akin to what the programme of abstract art gives us over to think: an encounter with what is evocative in the assemblage of material, in lines of force and resistance, in the play of light and darkness, and in the fading away of objects. These dynamics belong to being in language, where the cast of a self’s shadow falls into the epic of words. If the supervisory relationship can be imagined as an experiment in the field of speech, a new discussion on the contentious problem of learning can be made from the vantage of listening to and elaborating the language of teaching. Then, when the subject represents her or his practices to another, supervision will find itself wandering into the thicket of what is most enigmatic in the desire to become a speaking subject. Yet when asked why would anyone want to become a teacher, beginners repeat or feel that they must repeat stock answers to be intelligible to whomever they imagine the questioner to represent. Replies go something like this: I want to become a teacher because I care about children or love my subject area that has been ruined by others; I feel the call to be helpful to society and to the future; I wish to emulate a past teacher who helped me and be a role model to others who have none; I need to change the educational establishment because of my own (bad or good) experience as a student. Supervisors are rarely asked why they want to become a supervisor, although they, too, may say they supervise only to improve practices, share their experience and help others avoid what has already happened to them. But this reduces everyone to needs waiting to be met, spoken about rather than urged to speak. It is as if, in the effort to distinguish firmly good from bad and success from failure, the profession must guarantee itself before the time of understanding. In other words, the profession is caught in the trap of repeating mantras of teaching without remembering or working through childhood fantasies, anxieties and defences made from being educated while
Punctum Books, May 23, 2016
Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies, Oct 11, 2012
![Research paper thumbnail of Mental Health for Educators[29] copy](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/120198661/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Dio Press, 2021
This is the table of contents to a co-authored short book by Deborah Britzman and Aziz Guzel from... more This is the table of contents to a co-authored short book by Deborah Britzman and Aziz Guzel from Dio Press.
When History Returns: Psychoanalytic Quests for Humane Learning, 2024
When History Returns brings together psychoanalytic theories of learning with the antinomies of s... more When History Returns brings together psychoanalytic theories of learning with the antinomies of social strife. From a psychoanalytic perspective, history returns through transitional scenes of inheriting a past one could not make, experiencing a present affected by what came before, and facing a future one can neither know nor predict. Taking such scenes as the subject of education, Deborah P. Britzman provides new approaches and vocabulary for conceptualizing experience and understanding, as expressed in psychoanalysis, literature, film, clinical case studies, and warm pedagogy. Britzman argues that novel quests for humane responsibility take hold in the fallout of understanding, in the feel of history, in imaginative dialogues and missed encounters, and in searches for friendship, belonging, and affiliation. Each chapter charts these quests in contemporary education, carrying readers into the heart of learning and the emotional situations that urge the transitions of difficult knowledge into care for thinking and the questions that follow.
Mental Health for Educators, 2021
Mental Health for educators opens the heart of teaching and learning with a generous regard for t... more Mental Health for educators opens the heart of teaching and learning with a generous regard for the complexities of education as an emotional situation and expression of life. Utilizing psychoanalytic vocabulary, selected topics touch upon the educator's experiences of teaching in crowds and on-line while trying to get to know the lives of others and the self. With wit and clear analysis topics include matters of love and hate in pedagogy, problems of misunderstanding and loss of meaning, the handling of anxiety and inhibitions in university life, the dilemmas of helping and dependency, and pictures of mental life as our emotional situation. The book is written with a charming style of inquiry that emerges from a view of education as a state of mind and the means for social bonds.
Book published by Myers Educational Press, 2021
With four major frames of this volume—phantasies of education, difficult knowledge, transforming ... more With four major frames of this volume—phantasies of education, difficult knowledge, transforming subjects and, psychoanalysis with pedagogy— I take a second look at the emotional situations of teaching and learning. To suggest the movements between psychical reality and external reality, the time of education will be treated as the sways between ‘there and then’ and ‘here and now.’ The structures, functions, and concepts that render education intelligible, after all, are affected by what came before, the feel of it now, and the wait for a future one can neither know nor predict the effects of not knowing. Education then presents as a confusion of time. We can ask how inside experience of education proceeds through transitional scenes of inheriting a past one could not make while experiencing the demands of the present one has never expected. And I see these processes as opening onto the dynamics of affecting concerns underway for thinking anew on matters of what thinking life is like because we have education. All told, by highlighting psychoanalytic methods of analysis and by bringing psychoanalytic concepts to pedagogy, learning and teaching can now involve education as a state of mind
Melanie Klein, early analysis, play and the question of freedom, 2016
Between the years of 1910 and 1939 Klein was a younger contemporary of Sigmund Freud, reading his... more Between the years of 1910 and 1939 Klein was a younger contemporary of Sigmund Freud, reading his findings and essays as he wrote them. She would be known for emphasizing aspects of Freud's theories-the life and death drives, anxiety and melancholia, and the mental agencies of id, ego, and superego-while significantly revising their developments with the subtle distinctions of infantile emotional life. Klein first observed in her practice with very young children and with adults, a mind-world composed of active object relations, multiple emotional dramas, affect scenarios, personifications of organs at war, and what she came to group under the terms of phantasies. As early as 1921, Klein believed that the object of child analysis was psychoanalytic understanding and not, as many of her child analyst colleagues argued at the time, helping the child achieve a stronger sense of reality by providing instructions in a psychoanalytic pedagogy. It was listening for the child's unasked questions Klein felt, that must be interpreted as an appeal to freedom. Two dilemmas follow: What can knowledge mean psychoan-alytically? And, how could Klein garner enough understanding to narrate with children and adults what she would simply call "a time before?" One can say that Klein's theory of the emotional world is, above all, a theory of phantasy that has as its destiny the development of the mind beholden to both the fate of internal object relations and the imagination so needed to think. Her theory of learning to live, then, remains radical and for education proposes deep existential dilemmas on the nature of knowledge, love, authority, thinking, and relationships in teaching and learning. But what are our selves? Everything, good or bad, that we have gone through from our earliest days onwards: all that we have received from the external world and all that we have felt in our inner world, happy and unhappy experiences, relations to people, activities, interests and thoughts of all kinds-that is to say, everything we have lived through-makes part of our selves and goes to build up our personalities. If some of our past relationships, with all the associated memories, with the wealth of feelings they called forth, could be suddenly wiped out of our lives, how impoverished and empty we should feel! How much love, trust, gratification, comfort and gratitude, which we experienced, would be
A flyer announcing the publication of my new book from Springer
Albany: State University of New York Press
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998
NY: Peter Lang Press, 2006
Albany: State University of New York, 2003
NY: Routledge Press, 2011
Keynotes in Teacher Education, 2006
Britzman deconstructs the myth of development that presupposes a chronology from immaturity to ma... more Britzman deconstructs the myth of development that presupposes a chronology from immaturity to maturity. More generally, she suggests that this imagined march of progress serves as a foundational wish for any education that is at once defined as the movement from ignorance to knowledge. The wish serves to defend against the problem of regression, hatred, and not learning from experience. She proposes a view of development as uneven and as “out of joint,” made stranger by the postmodern university where teacher education occurs. Brtizman then considers development as a problem of trying to know the mind that resists being known, as responsibility for the other, and as capable of containing frustration, or experience. To make this argument, she juxtaposes three views of development that center the question of uncertainty and unevenness: William James the psychologist who focused on the mind; Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who focused on the world; and Wilfred Bion, the psychoanalyst, who focused on affective relationships. With these views, she proposes an ethics of teacher education.
This paper was given to the 63 Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan in ... more This paper was given to the 63 Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan in October 2020.
Psychoanalysis has given to education affecting vocabulary for studying the reception of unconscious situations of human experience, for acknowledging otherness and, due to our susceptibility to the unknown, for thinking about the fate of learning. New words are used to rewrite the epistemology of experience with the situations contained. The focus is on embodiment and the expressions of sensate life. Experience, too, is no longer thought to be unified. Instead it refers to the self’s capacity to tolerate frustration so as to create the work of getting to know emotional experience (Bion 1994). Frustration is an implicit quality of learning and as an emotional situation, being frustrated with the object of learning can unmoor our reasons and leave us bereft. These difficulties of approach bring me to link experience with otherness and relate human existence to our dilemmas within finding and losing significance.
A psychoanalytic awareness of time in COVID may take us back to a child’s urgent questions made f... more A psychoanalytic awareness of time in COVID may take us back to a child’s urgent questions made from having to wait without knowing why. That is the situation we are in as we ask, When will this be over? How long will this take? Are we there yet? From the vantage of psychoanalytic time, temporality as a psychical function and force is both organizing and disorganizing. But the feel, experience, and narratives of psychical reality are difficult to grasp. Our narratives are framed by the subjunctive mood, an estranging imaginary of attitudes, wishes, desires, and anticipations for what almost should have happened: ‘if only….’ ‘Or if I were …’ There are wishes for lost hopes to return once again. And like a dream, there are images of waiting, feeling rushed, running out of time, being too late, or losing one’s place.
AERA Conference Paper, 2019
For the fields of education, socio-political thought, critical theory, and cultural studies, dedi... more For the fields of education, socio-political thought, critical theory, and cultural studies, dedicated as these are to the research and interpretations of the twists, turns, and broken records of human agency, what continues to disquiet imagination are vexing matters of what people are like, how they come to be the people they are, and when the self feels others as distinct and needed. Psychoanalysis begins with such questions, but only by linking the difficulties of learning its methods of inquiry to the disturbing qualities of its relational conundrums.
The paper suggests five qualitative difficulties on representing conflictive emotional life drawn from the work of Melanie Klein (1882-1960).
This paper considers Sigmund Freud's work with the poet HD and the context of psychoanalysis and ... more This paper considers Sigmund Freud's work with the poet HD and the context of psychoanalysis and war. It was given as the Kneller Lecture in 2006 for the American Education Association. A larger discussion is found in Britzman, The Very Thought of Education (Albany Press, State University of New York, 2009
Kneller Lecture, American Educational Studies Association, Nov. 2006
Drawing on the problem of imagining sexuality, paper comments on contemporary debates in feminism... more Drawing on the problem of imagining sexuality, paper comments on contemporary debates in feminism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Three theories are discussed: Jacqueline Rose’s feminist views on sexuality and vision; Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic orientation to sexuality as both a problem of language, narrative revolts and as a constitutive vulnerability; and, Eve Sedgwick’s imaginative axioms for sexuality as a problem for epistemology. While part one of the paper provides a theoretical lens for conceptualizing sexuality, the second part moves to problems of practices in research, study and pedagogy. Of special interest is how the ideas developed in the fields of queer theory, Feminism, and psychoanalysis proffer new ways to conceptualize the affective tensions between, on the one hand, sexuality and culture and on the other hand, between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The paper concludes with an outline of three urgencies for research, pedagogy, and study.
Throughout my work, I have brought into conversation the lives of a series of people that, in my ... more Throughout my work, I have brought into conversation the lives of a series of people that, in my mind become emblems for what I have been developing as "difficult knowledge." My approach to difficult knowledge is now mainly through psychoanalysis. I can group them into three: literary writers such as Anne Frank, and H.D., and H.G. Adler; the political writer who leans on aesthetic conflicts, Adorno; the educational philosophers, Maxine Greene and William James, and the psychoanalysts: Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Hillel Klein. They have some things in common: all lived during times of war, some are survivors of the Shoah, all were curious about the course of narratives of life and its discontentment, and all continue to have a difficult reception: either idealized or disparaged. My approach was been with the question of how each individual presents suffering, learning, waiting, overcoming, and desire. To quote a Freudian slip I made in my book, The very thought of education, these figures are my "transference people."
1 This contribution is a shorted version of a chapter-A Psychoanalyst in the classroom: on the hu... more 1 This contribution is a shorted version of a chapter-A Psychoanalyst in the classroom: on the human condition of education-to be published September 2015 with the State University of New York Press.
These are the founding questions ignorant schoolmaster proposes to pedagogy dedicated to the pres... more These are the founding questions ignorant schoolmaster proposes to pedagogy dedicated to the presupposition of equality of intellect and so to the subject as capable of putting together her or his own thoughts. Without this assumption of an equality of intellect there is only stratifying explication, isolation, inhibition, and a litany of negations. The schoolmaster's questions are a tonic to the will and lend faith to the idea that one can teach and learn what one does not know.
Two intertwined predicaments bring me to join the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein who argued that dep... more Two intertwined predicaments bring me to join the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein who argued that depression is the origin of the human condition with Paulo Freire's call for a radical humanization to release oppression. The first concerns the question what transformation transforms; while the second inquires into the relation between oppression and depression hold in loss, mourning, and symbolization.
Dio Press, 2022
Mental Health for Educators opens the heart of teaching and learning with a generous regard for t... more Mental Health for Educators opens the heart of teaching and learning with a generous regard for the complexities of education as an emotional situation. Britzman and Guzel introduce a psychoanalytic vocabulary that touches the educator's affective experiences of teaching in crowds, online, in one's dreams, in matters of belief and depression, and in trying to get to know the lives of others. With wit and clear analysis, selected topics include matters of love and hate in learning, problems of misunderstanding and loss of meaning, the encounters with anxiety and inhibitions in university life, and the dilemmas of helping and dependency in teaching and learning
Author's note: This paper is a shortened and reframed version of an earlier published paper, " Be... more Author's note: This paper is a shortened and reframed version of an earlier published paper, " Between Psychoanalysis and pedagogy: Scenes of rapprochement and alienation. " Curriculum Inquiry 43:1 (2013): 95-117.
A response to Dr. Glocer Fiorini's presentation on Misogyny given at the ATPPP, 44th Scientific S... more A response to Dr. Glocer Fiorini's presentation on Misogyny given at the ATPPP, 44th Scientific Session, Toronto Institute for Psychoanalysis, April 2, 2016
Talk given on Rosh Hashana, 2022
In 1937 the composer, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), wrote a little essay with the enigmatic titl... more In 1937 the composer, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), wrote a little essay with the enigmatic title, “How one becomes lonely.” His style of taking things apart for new arrangements, and his mingling of chutzpah to create a world not yet with the sounding of lament for a world no longer1 came to mind when Cantor Wunch invited me to give a talk on Rosh Hashanah. When asked about my topic, I said I would like to speak to senses of loneliness.
An interview with Deborah Britzman on university student activism, conducted and transcribed by R... more An interview with Deborah Britzman on university student activism, conducted and transcribed by Roshaya Rodeness of McMaster University on their website "distrupted."
For the fields of education, socio-political thought, critical theory, literary and cultural stud... more For the fields of education, socio-political thought, critical theory, literary and cultural studies, dedicated as these are to the analysis of the twists, returns, and broken records of human agency, historical memory, and social intercourse, the vexing matter of what people are like, how they come to be the people they are, and at what point other persons are felt to matter, continues