Abstract

We now encounter psychoanalysis and dialogue with Sigmund Freud about education as an impossible business, and how educational encounters can be riddled with infantilisation, envy, greed and hatred. Where students demand instant gratification and lecturers can be sadistic. Freud insisted that humans are competitive and aggressive creatures and educators, in the name of rationality, airbrush this out of the picture. We consider other Freudian perspectives, including those of Deborah Britzman, who regards love and education as intimates, and their offerings to be precarious. Contemporary novels and films illuminate this and we get insight into the intensity, ambiguities and pain of shifting perspectives. We also consider how the psychoanalytic lens enables us to see processes of socialization or formation in less rigid, more relational and interactive ways. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott reminds us that we are always and inevitably forged in relationship, for better as well as worse.