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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 Klein, she analyzes experiences of difficult knowledge, pedagogy, group psychology, theory, and questions of loneliness in learning education. Throughout the book, education appears and is transformed in its various guises: as a nervous condition, as social relation, as authority, as psychological knowledge, as quality of psychical reality, as fact of natality, as the thing between teachers and students, as an institution, and as a play between reality and fantasy.
About the author
Deborah P. Britzman is the author of Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning; The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions; and A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom: On the Human Condition in Education, all published by SUNY Press, among many other books.
