From the author of In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer comes an intensive look at the practice of psychoanalysis through interviews with “Aaron Green,” a Freudian analyst in New York City. Malcolm is accessible and lucid in describing the history of psychoanalysis and its development in the United States. It provides rare insight into the contradictory world of psychoanalytic training and treatment and a foundation for our understanding of psychiatry and mental health. "Janet Malcom has managed somehow to peer into the reticent, reclusive world of psychoanalysis and to report to us, with remarkable fidelity, what she has seen. When I began reading I thought condescendingly, 'She will get the facts right, and everything else wrong.' She does get the facts right, but far more pressive, she has been able to capture and convey the claustral atmosphere of the profession. Her book is journalism become art." —Joseph Andelson, The New York Times Book Review
In classrooms and lectures we learn not only about academic topics but also about ourselves, our peers and how people and ideas interact. Education – An Impossible Profession extends the ways in which we might think about these processes by offering a refreshing reconsideration of key educational experiences including those of: being judged and assessed, both formally and informally adapting to different groups for different purposes struggling to think under pressure learning to recognise and adapt to the expectations of others. This book brings psychoanalysis to new audiences, graphically illustrating its importance to understandings of teaching, learning and classrooms. Drawing on the author’s original research, it considers the classroom context, including policy demands and professional pressures, and the complexity of peer and pedagogic relationships and interactions asking how these might be being experienced and what implications such experiences might have for learners and teachers. The discussions will be of interest not only to teachers, leading-learners and teacher-educators, but also to individuals interested in education policy, professional practice and theories of education.
Over the past century psychoanalysis has gone on to establish training institutes, professional societies, accreditation procedures, and models of education, thus bringing into uneasy alliance all three impossible pursuits. In Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education, Emanuel Berman turns his attention to the current status and future prospects of this daunting project. Berman is ideally suited to tackle the impossibility of psychoanalytic education. A graduate of two psychoanalytic institutes, one in Israel and one in America, he has devoted much of his professional life to psychoanalytic education and the organizational issues embedded in it. In Impossible Training, Berman describes the complex emotional and organizational dynamics of psychoanalytic training. Placing these issues within the context of major controversies in psychoanalytic history, he shows how generations of students have either idealized a "proper analytic identity," which evolves into a persecutory ideal, or rebelled against these standards. Are such persecuting and infantilizing trends inherent in analytic training, he asks, or can psychoanalytic education transcend them through changes in its structure and rules? For Berman, the relational and intersubjective trends in contemporary psychoanalysis call for changes in analytic supervision, not least of which is heightened attentiveness to the many relationships that gain expression in the supervisory process. Envisioned in this relational manner, supervision can become a more personal experience, less guarded, and more conducive to the development of a fertile transitional space between supervisor and supervisee. Anchoring his consideration of the present in the controversies of the past, Berman concludes by considering the mission of psychoanalytic educators today: to provide trainees with the resources to cope creatively with the as yet unknown challenges of tomorrow.
Winner of the 2009 Gary A. Olson Award presented by JAC - a journal of rhetoric, culture, and politics For anyone who has ever been to school, the very thought of education recalls an emotional world denounced. What happens then if we try to understand the emotional scenery of education? Author Deborah P. Britzman proposes that the psychoanalysis of love and hate in learning provides creative commentary on our contemporary educational controversies. Drawing upon novels, art, psychoanalytic theory, clinical material, and philosophical debates on human nature, Britzman presents a psychoanalytic education of uncertainty. She focuses on key encounters: thinking, development, reading, psychology, transference, countertransference, and learning a profession. From the collapse of contemporary pedagogical themes to the work of reparation, Britzman explores the fantasies of education for the purpose of returning ideas of grace, hope, humor, and humility to the impossible professions (education, government, and medicine).
An astute exploration of the complexities of working and learning in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care, Professor Helen Penn tells of her experiences of working as a teacher, social worker, campaigner, researcher and writer, and so reflects on the perennial and complex issues which shape this expanding field. Mapping the author’s career from the mid-sixties onward, ‘Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible’ is a tribute to the progress that has been made in Early Childhood Education and Care over the past 70 years and is a celebration of those who have acted on their principles to articulate and remedy hidden suffering. A first-hand commentary on adult-child relations, poverty, working with families and engaging with democracy and inequality, Penn’s narrative reconstructs her past and, in doing so, produces a social history that records the various shifts in policy and public attitudes which she has witnessed. The author recognizes the collective effort and teamwork involved in working within organizations, as well as the constraints and tensions such organizations can create. She comments on the wider political system and assesses the particular pattern of educational inequality and oppression which afflicts the UK. One of the best known and most respected figures in her field, Penn provides a unique perspective on change as well as offering a framework for understanding, assessing and working within the field of Early Childhood Education and Care. Insightful and frank, witty and funny, this book will be a valuable read for students, academics, researchers and practitioners involved in this field.
The decision to go to graduate school is easy for future doctors and lawyers: they need a professional degree to start their careers. But for many young creative workers, aspiring artists, and intellectuals, grad school poses an existential fork in the road. An MFA or a humanities PHD can give you time to study something you love among people with similar interests, but it can also uproot you geographically and saddle you with debt. Given the current job market, is grad school really worth it- financially, professionally, and emotionally? In this book, a wide range of intellectuals and creative types share their stories about going to grad school or avoiding it, and what that decision has meant in their lives. They provide an inside look at what graduate programs are really like and share the wisdom they wish they had going in. -- Publisher description