Learning and Its Challenges

Learning is the most basic means by which we can change ourselves. Of all the activities of the mind, learning is perhaps the most fundamental, yet one of the most provocative and difficult to understand.

The Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis, Volume Four

In this fourth volume of the Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis, ten new essays by an interdisciplinary array of educationalists, psychoanalysts and academics confront head-on the many problems associated with the mystery of learning. What is learning? How are ideas transmitted from the mind of one person to the mind of another? What makes a good teacher?

Like all the preceding volumes in The Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis, ideas and opinions are presented from a contrasting variety of viewpoints within contemporary psychoanalytic theory. Individual chapters are devoted to the theories of learning implicit in the work of Freud, Jung, Klein, Bion, Winnicott, and Lacan.

Other topics explored in this extremely comprehensive and thought-provoking collection include: how to teach psychoanalytically; the relationship between learning difficulty and writer's block; and the problems inherent in teaching psychoanalysis itself.