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 apparatus, the drives, the unconscious, the development of morality, and transference have changed throughout Freud’s _oeuvre_. An ideal text for courses in education studies, human development, and curriculum studies, _Freud and Education_ concludes with new (...) Freudian-influenced approaches to the old dilemmas of educational research, theory, and practice. (shrink)

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 disavowal render inexpressible to the other the work of mourning and drive its myriad expressions. A different way of putting the dilemma is that grief calls upon symbolic equation and the pain (...) of symbolization. Deborah Britzman's coda reads the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's consideration of depression as the origin of the human condition with Paulo Freire's call to educators for a radical humanization to release oppression. Between Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Klein's Love, Guilt, and Reparation, the coda traces a signifying loss that attests to the entwined roots of the self/other matrix with attention to the needed fluctuations within interiority and exteriority, loss and the depressive position, illness and health, and psychoanalysis with pedagogy. (shrink)

_Offers a new view of pedagogical practices to psychoanalysts interested in pedagogy._.