Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning

by Deborah P. Britzman

This book argues for education's reconsideration of what psychoanalytic theories of love and hate might mean to the design of learning and pedagogy. Britzman sets in tension three studies of education, studies in psychoanalysis, and studies of ethics to consider how larger social and cultural histories live in the small history of the subject. Britzman casts her net widely to consider questions of sex education, the work of Anna Freud in reencountering the Diary of Anne Frank, reading practices in pedagogy, anti-racist pedagogy and the question of love, and the arguments between education and psychoanalysis.

199 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1998

Reviews

[Cathlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work is central to my dissertation so I should probably give it 5 stars, yah? Not pleasure reading by any means, but Britzman absolutely kills it with her analysis of The Diary of Anne Frank and a discussion of "difficult knowledge." I owe so much to this book.