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Book
ReviewLooking
Into Educational ExperienceAfter-education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and psychoanalytic
histories of learning. Deborah P. Britzman, 2003, New York: State University
of New York Press; ISBN 0 7914 5674 9, 214 pp., £15.75
SAGE Publications, Inc.200410.1191/0967550704ab018XX
MariaTamboukou
University of East London
`What
is education that it should give us trouble?' This is the question that this
book revolves around, tracing differences in the ways psychoanalysis and particularly
Anna Freud's and Melanie Klein's work has dealt with the problematics emerging
in its discussion. Such differences have been discussed previously; however,
what Britzman's contribution offers is a proposition for a synthesis of these
differences or rather for making connections between them. In the context
of this debate, psychoanalysis and education have been perceived as either
incompatible fields to be kept apart, or as overlapping areas, influen- cing,
supporting and even undermining each other. In charting the map of the Freud—Klein
controversies, Britzman articulates her own questions: `where does education
come from?' and `does it work to repair its own harm?' To speak of reparation,
however, something must have been broken first: `this something which breaks'
is the trouble of education, Britzman argues, further noting that `perhaps
that something, its fragments of historical truth and its kernel of madness,
is what make education, for both children and adults, so difficult, so subject
to aggression, and yet always promising for rep- aration' (p. 69). Britzman
further reflects on the issues of conflict and anxiety, contextualizing them
in her own work of introducing Anna Freud's `Four lectures on psychoanalysis
for teachers and parents' to the undergraduate students of her teacher education
course. In looking into this experience, what Britzman values more from Anna
Freud seems to be the latter's strategy of respecting the anxiety that ideas
can arouse. She discusses a wide range of questions her students have raised
for Anna Freud and indeed for herself and in comment- ing on the richness
but also harshness of these questions, she poses a difficult pedagogical question:
`what does it mean to meet the auto- nomy of the other without trying to shape
it?' (p. 81). This question of autonomy is further developed in Britzman's
con- sideration of how group psychology can possibly become a kind of after-education
in terms of perceiving autonomy as relational and of becoming reflective of
the ways human beings influence each other. Britzman's fourth chapter on group
psychology offers illuminating insights into the importance of emotional ties
and individual/group
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interactions.
Issues around conflict also come into the discussion of this chapter; they
are, however, further elaborated in Chapter 5, where Britzman considers the
interrelation of phantasy and theory, looking in particular at destruction
and reparation. Drawing on both Klein's and Sedwick's work, Britzman examines
unsettling questions around anxiety, learning, aggressiveness, curiosity,
creativity and the- ories we never `step foot in', to ultimately address the
question: `why do we have theory at all?' (p. 134). Loneliness is the last
theme of the book and Britzman draws here on Klein's essay `On the sense of
lone- liness' and Sedwick's self-analysis deployed in the `Dialogue on love'.
Loneliness is indeed the theme where the Freud—Klein controversies find
a point of convergence, since in the work of both analysts, lone- liness was
thought of as an analogy relating phantasy to reality. In Britzman's conceptualization,
revisiting loneliness in their work is a process of bringing together `the
psychoanalytic archive from which we can construct histories of learning after
the experience of education' (p. 156). I found myself being drifted away while
reading this book and while I had a sense of not everything being coherent
in the way the six chapters connect to each other, there was something of
the plea- sure of roaming the incoherent, a transitional space formed between
`what we can learn from the book' and what is pleasurable about it, albeit
difficult to be identified as strictly educational or educative. Something,
I suppose, of the taste of the elusiveness of after- education.