Deborah P. Britzman

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• Distinguished Research Professor, Emeritus at York University

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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...

This chapter, written in 1993 provides an early introduction to the state of multicultural education for a deeper and more complex understanding the dynamics of multiculturalism by attending to the particularities of gender. I explore the damaging effects for students and for educators when the meaning of gender is reduced to the category of sex-ro...

In this chapter, then, I argue for a deeper and more complex understanding of muhicuhural education by attending to the particularities of gender. I explore the damaging effects for students and for educators when the meaning of gender is reduced to the category of sex-role stereotyping and when muhicuhural education dissipates into an endless cele...

In 2011 I published a short book introducing Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic discussions on education. Freud and Education was published with Routledge Press. In 2022 Professor A. Guishi translated the text into Japanese. I have attached the publication information.

A psychoanalytic, field theory approach that argues that expressions of gender and sexuality pose fundamental challenges to professional formation and its terms for education. Because situations of gender and sexuality are at odds with knowledge of them and are, by nature, incomplete, my comments are structured as notes for further exploration. For...

Mental Health for Educators opens the heart of teaching and learning with a generous regard for the complexities of education as psychological phenomenon, emotional situation, and as an expression of life. Britzman and Güzel introduce a psychoanalytic vocabulary that touches the educator's affective experiences of teaching in crowds, online, in one...

A look at pedagogy and its inhibitions. through psychoanalytic concepts.

This volume traces the history of Western philosophy of education through the Age of Enlightenment. The period between 1650 and 1850 was one of rapid intellectual development that revolutionized how education is viewed. Even the most progressive thinkers of the start of this period would have found the educational ideas expressed at its end odd, al...

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...

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 organizi...

Sigmund Freud's “Three Essays on Sexuality” (1905) inaugurated psychoanalytic attention to adolescence, in tandem with drive theory which specified psychical development as the conflict between biology and meaning, pleasure and unpleasure, and self and other. As pubescent resurgence of infantile sexuality, Strum und Drang characterized the adolesce...

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 sel...

: For those of us working in the fields of education and psychotherapy, the insistence that misogyny affects us all brings to the forefront the painful question of lifting negation in order to think of one’s own contribution to disclaimed bodily hatred. Thinking with the psychoanalytic temporality of before and after, misogyny is approached as a me...

The preceding symposium articles speculate on the psychosocial dynamics of discrimination as reverberating with grief, mourning, melancholia, and denial. They invite a psychoanalytic paradox on the fate of inchoate loss and its complex relation to oppression and depression: constellations of attachment to loss met with its social and psychical disa...

Melanie Reizes Klein (1882–1960) was one of the most original and challenging psychoanalysts of the twentieth century. She cast her lot with rudimentary life and the chaos of beginnings. In generational terms, she opens the second chapter of Freudian psychoanalysis and does so in such a way that for the rest of her life she would have to argue as t...

In late 1926 Klein emigrated from Berlin to London; the move was fortuitous, not only because the 44 year-old Klein could begin again with new patients. There were new colleagues whom she hoped would not be hostile to her work as were those analysts in Berlin and Vienna. She entered the British Psychoanalytical Society as a member by 1927 with a ne...

We want to home in on Melanie Klein’s 1921 and 1926 years in Berlin and meet a number of her patients, from ages 2 to 17: Fritz, Felix, Lisa, Inge, Egon, and Erna. With these children Klein began to articulate her mode of practice in the young field of early analysis. With confidence in new findings, she advocated for the child’s capacity for self-...

To bring to the patient’s knowledge the unconscious, repressed impulses existing in him, and, for that purpose, to uncover the resistances that oppose this extension of his knowledge about himself…. Our hope is to achieve this by exploiting the patient’s transference to the person of the physician, so as to induce him to adopt our conviction of the...

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 wi...

Resumen Deborah Britzman examina los aportes de la teoría queer para la educación, para repensar la pedagogía y el conocimiento, en particular lo que llama " técnicas para hacer sentido y señalar lo que descarta o no puede tolerar saber ". Se centra en tres " insistencias " metodológicas de la teoría queer: lo que entiende como " estudio de los lím...

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 our understanding of transformation with the question, what does transformation transform? The second inquires int...

This paper is a response to Dr. Glocer Fiorini's presentation on misogyny and psychoanalytic thought

Melanie Klein’s (1921) “The Development of a Child,” went through a number of revisions over a three-year period and, as late as 1947, she added another note on her earliest work, bidding educational efforts farewell. Snippets of clinical work previously discussed returned in other writing and are worked over, as if something earlier was missed. It...

Ever since Freud turned to myth, literature, tragedy, art, and studies of the creative writer, psychoanalysts have drawn upon aesthetic objects as exemplars of the caches of emotional life, the fate of the subjunctive mood and, too, for affectations that drive and may destroy the elusive search for beauty, truth, and poetic knowledge. In one of his...

We turn to the arguments for and against Klein’s theory and technique that occurred under the auspices of the British Psychoanalytical Society in London between the years of 1941 and 1945, known as “The Controversial Discussions” between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. We do so not only to take a pulse of the reception of Klein’s theory during these...

Just at the start of the Freud-Klein Controversies, in the midst of World War II, Mrs. Klein, then 59 conducted a 4-month analysis with Richard, a 10 year-old boy. The year was 1941. Due to the Blitzkrieg in London, the analysis took place in a small rented playroom in Wales. They met for 93 sessions. As was her practice, after each session in her...

This volume introduces the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein to the general field of education and traces her theories of mental life as an emotional situation, through to problems of self/other relations in our own time. The case is made for Klein’s relevance and the difficulties her theories pose to the activities of learning and pedagogical relation....

Publicity for new book from Springer press: Due in Dec. 2015

A book proposal and now in press with Springer

A psychoanalyst in the classroom provides rich descriptions of the surprising ways individuals handle matters of love and hate with writing and reading. Developed themes include: the handling of technique in psychoanalysis and pedagogy; the uses of theory; regression to adolescence; the inner life of gender; the untold story of the writing block; a...

This essay elaborates a conceptual geography for a psychology of education through Freud's three experimental models for education: Auflarung (Enlightenment as a question of knowledge), Bildung (the bringing up of culture and life as a problem of affect); and Nacherziehung (after-education as a problem of narrative. Education's entanglement with th...

My book proposal that outlines a forthcoming book from Springer Press.

Paper examines a number of writers and psychoanalysts who discuss the psychical experiences of the so-called "Writing Block."

This paper discusses the writing block as opening a particular configuration of the difficulty of unlearning the repetition compulsion, itself a quality of writing and the means for working through. My hunch is that people come to the university to experience their writing block (depression). I first ask why reading for anxiety matters to understan...

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.

http://www.lline.fi/en/issue/2_2014/issue-22014

My discussion embraces the subjective qualities of the psychoanalytic clinical case study as a method for writing narratives of pedagogy dedicated to interpreting the latency of communication: what has been held back, forgotten, acted out and unconsciously repeated. At the heart of the case study is the literary dilemma of putting to words the tran...

Working with psychoanalytic formulations, this paper explores the question of beginning pedagogy

With the question of what is between psychoanalysis and pedagogy, this essay presents a psychoanalytic frame for thinking about the study of uncertainty in teaching and learning from the vantage of the education of the author and her notion of “difficult knowledge.” I review my body of research through these dilemmas to picture a theory of learning...

Encounters with adolescence and its quest for truth, beauty and thought can be used as a psychoanalytic framework in understanding the education of the helping professions. A significant conflict resides in the state of professional knowledge toward psychical life that tends to be expressed as alienation between developmental theory and pedagogy. I...

Encounters with adolescence and its quest for truth, beauty, and thought can be used as a psychoanalytic framework in understanding the education of the helping professions. A significant conflict resides in the state of professional knowledge toward psychical life that tends to be expressed as alienation between developmental theory and pedagogy....

Freud asking whether psychoanalysis could be taught in the university, and then whether it could be learned, provides an occasion for asking about the emotional uses of theory. The paper draws from literature, clinical writing and pedagogy to build a psychoanalytic discussion of teaching and learning that takes seriously phantasies of knowledge mad...

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 v...

The concept of education–its dangers and promises and its illusions and revelations—threads throughout Sigmund Freud’s body of work. This introductory volume by psychoanalytic authority, Deborah P. Britzman, explores key controversies of education through a Freudian approach. It defines how fundamental Freudian concepts such as the psychical appara...

This article draws upon psychoanalytic theory to study the problem of learning from experiences in group psychology. It focuses upon the ignored questions: what is it to think within group psychology? Why is it so difficult for groups to learn from their experience and to theorize their process of development? What sorts of knowledge allow a group...

This essay comments on the emotional difficulties psychoanalytic discussion introduces to conceptualising the poesis of gender through its reconsideration of the valence of aggression and its development in psychical reality. It returns to the 1936 lectures on the emotional life of gender given by Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere to a public about to...

The psychoanalyst is a student in the overabundant studio of resistance. This article inquires into such an affected learning position in educational contexts to ask what resistance to learning holds in store. What can it mean for the educator to assume the position of student in the overabundant studio of resistance and involve learning with quest...

Teachers bear witness to the wondrous world of sexuality. This essay explores the centrality of Eros to education and links the teacher's desire to the emotional situation of the student/teacher relationship. I propose that learning involves our erotic selves and our fantasy life. But such a view requires that teachers consider a psychology of love...

I deconstruct the myth of development that presupposes a chronology from immaturity to maturity. More generally, I suggest 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 and serves to defend against the problem of regression, hatred, and not learnin...

The paper considers tow artists in Vienna 1933, from the vantage of trying to express the inexpressible in history--their personal history and the history to which they responded. These include: the analysis of the poet H.D. and the conductor Bruno Walter and their work with Sigmund Freud. How do we understand today the failure of imagination?

Introduction to the 2006 Address Deborah Britzman deconstruct 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 def...

A novel can teach us about our act of reading. Ishiguro's Never let me go is analysed as an occasion for thinking about reading as an allegory of psychic development. Drawing on the work of Melanie Klein and Hannah Arendt, my psychoanalytic reading explores the discord between the signifier and the signified, seeing this conflict as belonging to la...

Freud's “Little Hans” and Melanie Klein's first case study of “Fritz” are read alongside a contemporary popular film to consider the tensions of sexual enlightenment, a goal first articulated by Freud and later rejected by Klein. These documents represent conundrums of gender—as relation, phantasy, and defense. They do not settle our understanding...

Associate Professor on the Faculty of Education, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3. Her primary areas of scholarship are curriculum theory, teacher education, and cultural studies.

Why is it difficult to remember learning to teach? This paper is a psychoanalytic mediation on the young teacher's memory, long after the mishaps of teaching.

This article explores a theory of narrative that can account for its underlying structures and can critique a paradox of consciousness‐raising: that the more that narratives are privileged in teacher education, the less we know about how this narrative affects what will come to be said about teacher education's reliance upon stories of experience a...

This article is a reconceptualization of Britzman's 1998 concept "Difficult knowledge', suggesting a move from the attraction to trauma to the dilemmas of learning as such through the psychoanalytic ideas of deferred action and the late quest for symbolization. The paper proposes three models of learning drawn from Winnicott, Bion, and Milner.

This paper explores two questions in relation to the authors' project, “Difficult Knowledge in Teaching and Learning: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry.” They describe how their original question, “What makes knowledge difficult?,” transformed into “What is it to represent ‘difficult’ knowledge?” They speculate on the resonances that this crisis of represen...

In After-Education Deborah P. Britzman raises the startling question, What is education that it should give us such trouble? She explores a series of historic and contemporary psychoanalytic arguments over the nature of reality and fantasy for thinking through the force and history of education. Drawing from the theories of Anna Freud and Melanie K...