Book Overview

This is the first and only book to detail the history of the century-long relationship between education and psychoanalysis. Relying on primary and secondary sources, it provides not only a historical context but also a psychoanalytically informed analysis. In considering what it means to think about teaching from a psychoanalytic perspective and in reviewing the various approaches to and theories about teaching and curriculum that have been informed by psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, Taubman uses the concept of disavowal and focuses on the effects of disavowed knowledge within both psychoanalysis and education and on the relationship between them.

Tracing three historical periods of the waxing and waning of the medical/therapeutic and emancipatory projects of psychoanalysis and education, the thrust of the book is for psychoanalysis and education to come together as an emancipatory project. Supplementing the recent work of educational scholars using psychoanalytic concepts to understand teaching, education, and schooling, it works to articulate the stranded histories ─ the history of what could have been and might still be in the relationship between psychoanalysis and education.