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Professor Deborah Britzman’s new book explores field of psychoanalysis with foundations of education

York University Distinguished Research Professor Deborah Britzman, in the Faculty of Education, has published her ninth book, Anticipating Education: Concepts for Imagining Pedagogy with Psychoanalysis.

Deborah Britzman

Deborah Britzman

Britzman is the Tier 1 York Research Chair in Pedagogy and Psycho-Social Transformation and focuses her research on the histories of psychoanalysis with education.

Anticipating Education is addressed to teachers, professors and students engaged in the critical, conceptual study of subjectivity at the heart of education. Britzman writes of education as if it could be conducted as an uncertain search for concepts, ideas, histories, emotional situations, and states of becoming.

Readers will encounter surprising narratives, studied as lost memories, predicaments of trying to know, and desires for greater freedom, all treated as touchstones of old and new conflicts affecting university life.

Four themes of teaching and learning are analyzed: phantasies of education; difficult knowledge; transforming subjects; and psychoanalysis with education. Britzman joins the tenders of emotional situations of pedagogy as stretching from historical trauma, social change, sexuality, learning inhibitions, and dynamics of love and hate in group life. The book furthers Britzman’s highly influential and groundbreaking contributions to thinking broadly on the reach and limits of having education.

In her introduction, ‘Late Education,’ Britzman writes, “If one could return to the sources of education, to where it all began, where would one be and with whom? What causes could be remembered? Such questions imagine education as a state of mind and the object of our search…”

As one of the most cited and prolific scholars in education, Britzman is internationally known for her erudite writing in the fields of philosophy, psychology, history, teacher education, critical theory, and literary studies and for taking on the difficult knowledge of our time.

In addition to earning the Tier 1 York Chair, Pedagogy and Psychosocial Transformations in 2017, Britzman has previously earned awards and recognition, including: Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; and Hans Loewald Memorial Reward, Internal Forum for Psychoanalytic Eduction (2015).

For more on the book, visit this link.