When History Returns: Psychoanalytic Quests for Humane Learning (SUNY series, Transforming Subjects: Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Studies in Education)

By: Deborah P. Britzman

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Synopsis: When History Returns brings together psychoanalytic theories of learning with the antinomies of social strife. From a psychoanalytic perspective, history returns through transitional scenes of inheriting a past one could not make, experiencing a present affected by what came before, and facing a future one can neither know nor predict. Taking such scenes as the subject of education, Deborah P. Britzman provides new approaches and vocabulary for conceptualizing experience and understanding, as expressed in psychoanalysis, literature, film, clinical case studies, and warm pedagogy. Britzman argues that novel quests for humane responsibility take hold in the fallout of understanding, in the feel of history, in imaginative dialogues and missed encounters, and in searches for friendship, belonging, and affiliation. Each chapter charts these quests in contemporary education, carrying readers into the heart of learning and the emotional situations that urge the transitions of difficult knowledge into care for thinking and the questions that follow.