Britzman, Deborah P. (1998) Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. Reviewed by Victoria I. Muñoz

Britzman, Deborah P. (1998) Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press Pp. 199 $59.50 (Cloth) $19.95 (Paper)     ISBN 0-7914-3808-2 Reviewed by Victoria I. Muñoz Wells College May 23, 1999           In Lost Subjects, Contested Objects, Deborah Britzman invites the reader to join her in a process of liberatory imagination, what Maxine Greene (1988) describes as "the capacity to surpass the given and look at things as if they could be otherwise" (p. 3). For Greene, this process sustains human freedom. But it is not just enough to look, for seeing is to witness, and the limits of witnessing are clear from glancing at history. Greene continues, "To become different, of course, is not simply to will oneself to change. There is the question of being able to accomplish what one chooses to do. It is not only a matter of the capacity to choose; it is a matter of the power to act to attain one’s purposes" (p. 4).           Britzman urges action through an ethics of interference: A refusal to dominate and be dominated and the refusal to turn "the narcissism of minor differences" (p. 97) into life-long hatreds and despisals. "Education," according to Britzman, "must interfere. There is nothing else it can do for it demands of students and teachers that each come to something, make something more of themselves" (p. 10). What Britzman moves toward here is "a theory of love and hate in learning." She concedes that this may seem "beside the point, in most pedagogical attempts to consider inequality and the question of identity" (p. 98) and yet this is exactly a place to begin.           In this space, Britzman questions the educational practice of, what she calls, "a passion for ignorance" (p. 57): A concept that is developed throughout the text as a tension between wanting to learn (and unlearn) and wanting to not know (and deny). The book draws its title from this complicated psychological process. Demonstrating her close relationship with Maxine Greene, whose use of the imagination Britzman calls, "a method," (p. 56) this text is above all else an "invitation to think, the invitation to imagine" (p. 77).           By taking a psychoanalytical approach Britzman explores how individuals live within a larger social context that is often conflictive--communities, cultures, histories--and how we live within and with our individual selves as well; a psychological world that is just as conflictive as the external one. Dynamic and shifting, internal and external realities organize the self and the psyche. This dynamic interpretation of lived experience- -as both psychological and social--and her psychoanalytic analysis of this dialectical process distinguishes Britzman’s work in education.           Britzman asks difficult questions, such as, "Shall we admit that something other than consciousness interferes with education?" (p. 4). She thus asks the reader to consider as central in the classroom what cannot be seen or even necessarily spoken. The concept of consciousness (for example, critical consciousness, consciousness raising) has been key in the civil rights movement, women’s movement, gay and lesbian movement and in critical pedagogy. But here Britzman explores the other side of consciousness; the unconscious. She believes that, "Education is best considered as a frontier concept: something between the teacher and the student, something yet to become" (p. 4).           Britzman also engages the processes of hate and of love in trying to uncover resistance to difference. Because she believes that learning involves conflicts that are settled and unsettled throughout life, and which occur through and within human relationships (educational, intimate, social, and analytical) she writes, "the study of learning is inseparable from the study of love" (p. 31). Britzman interweaves critical pedagogy with psychoanalysis and investigates the complex relationship of the unconscious in learning and how parts of ourselves resist what Britzman calls, "difficult knowledge" (p. 2). Toward a Theory of Love and Hate in Learning           In the chapter, "On Becoming a ‘Little Sex Researcher,’" Britzman provides new ways to think about sex education curricula. Through a series of "what if" questions (a device she uses throughout the text for imagining, what Maxwell (1996) calls "thought experiments"), she disrupts the concept of "appropriateness," the central issue in the debate over what and when to teach about sex to "minors." Britzman’s questions push the reader to imagine sexuality as constructed and to imagine what new constructs could take the current model’s place: Should sex education be coupled with appropriateness of any kind? Can a notion of appropriateness ever be uncoupled from developmental theory? What if sex education became a lifetime study of the vicissitudes of knowledge, power, and pleasure? (p. 74) Imagine, for instance, sex education as beginning with questions of "fantasy, Eros, and the vicissitudes of life" (p. 66). Imagine truly caring for the self and holding the self in enough esteem-- in a relational rather than a narcissistic sense. Then, imagine unlearning what you thought you knew about sex to learn something new: What is completely unthought is that every learning is also an unlearning. What is yet to be made is a theory of learning that can tolerate its own implication in the passion for ignorance and in the apparatus Foucault called "knowledge/power/pleasure." Shall we begin to admit that the passion for ignorance structures even critical learning? (p. 75)           In "Queer Pedagogy and Its Strange Techniques," Britzman dismantles the belief that simply more education, that is, more information will prevent more hate and its crimes. Writing with others on the failure of information to arrest hatred, Britzman states: Along with cultural activists doing AIDS education work, I assume the failure of the old information discourses of education: knowledge of "facts" does not provide a direct line to the real, to the truth, and to righteous conduct. (p. 87) The study of love necessarily includes the study of hate. How else to make sense of the murder of Matthew Shepard, a 21 year old gay man who was a University of Wyoming student? Shepard "was beaten, burned and tied to a wooden ranch fence like a scarecrow until a passerby found him a half-day later, near death." A sophomore student is quoted as saying, " That has to do with the fact this is a cowboy place. People aren’t exposed to it. They’re too close-minded" (The Ithaca Journal, October 10, 1998, p. 1B). He died five days later after being on a respirator in critical condition.           The "it" in the sophomore’s sentence is homosexuality. So despised and different--not like them--for the two young men who were arrested and charged with Shepard’s murder that a young gay man had to die, and not just die but be pinned up like a scarecrow for all to see and for all queer people to beware: This is cowboy country and no cowboys are queer. The girlfriends of the young men accused of murdering Shepard were themselves charged with accessories to the crime. When I heard this I thought how symbolic this language is--women as accessories to men--but I also saw how tightly woven sexism and homophobia are. One of the girlfriends described how her boyfriend just "lost it" when he thought of how humiliated he felt that Shepard might have come on to him. What did he fear losing? What is lost when love reverses itself into hate? What is contested? Britzman continues: If a pedagogical project is to move beyond the repetition of identity and the only two subject positions allowed when identity is understood as one of self versus others, then pedagogy itself must become a problem of reading practices, of social relations, and of the means to refuse to think straight. (p. 92) Yes, there are queer cowboys in Wyoming. Imagine an elementary or secondary school teacher saying that out loud to the two young men who killed Matthew Shepard. Could it have made a difference to admit that cowboys can be queer? What is it you hate most about yourself? What do you negate in yourself? Isn’t that what you feel surrounded by? Afraid of? Would any of these psychoanalytical questions have provoked self-awareness or a caring for the self that becomes generous and includes caring for others?           Grappling with how the dynamics of love and hate can be attended to in education, Britzman writes: In my work on pedagogy, what I want to call "queer pedagogy," I am attempting to exceed such binary oppositions as the tolerant and the tolerated and the oppressed and oppressor yet still hold onto an analysis of social difference that can account for how dynamics of subordination and subjection work at the level of the historical, the structural, the epistemological, the conceptual, the social, and the psychic. But such efforts involve thinking through an implication that can tolerate a curiosity toward one’s own negations. My interest is to provoke conditions of learning that might allow for an exploration that unsettles the sediments of what one imagines when one imagines normalcy, what one imagines when one imagines difference. (p. 95) Who do we imagine as different from ourselves? Who is normal and like us? And how has education provided the dream for this?           The next chapter, "Narcissism of Minor Differences and the Problem of Anti-Racist Pedagogy," continues to work through many of the questions raised in the previous chapter on queer pedagogy but grapples with racism and the pedagogical strategies employed to reverse it. Britzman writes: Freud formulates a rather curious category, in Civilization and Its Discontents, to ponder the inclination toward aggressive hatred between social groups. The term narcissism of minor differences describes as a problem how individuals imagine themselves as members of a particular collectivity. The tension is not so much that people join together as it is what must be done in the name of group distinction. In Freud’s words: "It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness." (p. 97)           The relationships between racism and homophobia and the human capacity to find someone to hate as well as to love are investigated closely in these two chapters. Taken together, they constitute sustained and careful thinking on the psychological interconnections between racism and homophobia. These connections are beautifully--and painfully--drawn through her use of Jewish lesbian writing as an example. By taking a group of women who live and work in a racially ambiguous space Britzman is able to highlight many of the difficulties in developing anti-racist pedagogy which can also attend to homophobia and sexism. Britzman argues that: Given the Shoah, the idea of the Jew as "white" in both North America and Europe is barely fifty years old. In North America, persistent memories of what Joan Nestle calls, "a restricted country," the contemporary resurgence of the New Right’s militia movement and the movements of Christian fundamentalism to anti-Semitism and racism bother any seamless capacity or desire for many Jews to enmesh Jewishness with whiteness... We are left with the difficult question of something more intractable, namely the fantasy of imagining difference. (pp. 104 - 105) Her engagement with the work of Jewish lesbian writers presents the complexity of how race, gender, and sexuality interact and are constructed by and within communities, and how deeply conflictive shared identities can be. Jewish lesbian writers expose intra-community conflicts which raise questions of loyalty to the group; to be sexual is to be disloyal, to tell secrets is to betray. (These feelings of loyalty, secrecy, and betrayal are ones Britzman continues to explore in her chapter on Anne Frank’s diary). Exploring the fantasy of a unifying identity as well as "the fantasy of imagining difference" within communities, Britzman argues instead for "more than one look" (p. 112); to always include sexuality in our field of vision. Refusing to Guarantee Meaning           Denise Levertov (1987) explores the possibility of remaking language and the world letter by letter in her poem "Relearning the Alphabet." For the letter W she writes, Heart breaks but mends like good bone. (p. 99) Even while acknowledging that breaking apart one’s heart is inevitable, just as inevitable is that it will mend--if the bone is good. The hope is that underlying the pain is some solid structure that can regenerate itself and reintegrate the fragmentsóthis being necessary to risk loving again, knowing that breaks can be healed.           This poem came to mind upon finishing Britzman’s chapter, "On Making Education Inconsolable." I want to believe, as Levertov does, that things can be mended. To think of education as broken beyond repair feels unbearable but that is exactly what Britzman would like for us to do--tolerate the unbearable so as to risk learning something new. For this, she sustains throughout this chapter a dialogue with the work of Maxine Greene, especially with Professor (Britzman uses this title) Greene’s text, The Public School and the Private Vision: A Search for America in Education and Literature published in 1965.           The reason Britzman speaks with Greene has everything to do with trying to make the argument for turning to literature and the arts as a way for us in education to risk what we already think we know. Artists, Britzman agrees with Greene, "[offer] through their texts, the future stuff of curriculum--their anxious, celebratory, and transgressive dreams. What they [offer], and what Maxine Greene engages, is their refusal to guarantee meaning" (p. 52).           This refusal, I think, is the bone.           This chapter deeply saddens as it confronts the great losses of our time: The Shoah, Viet Nam, AIDS, and what is most stunning about this essay, "the unconscious of education." Britzman also returns the reader to this knowledge: The brutality of a nation’s origins returns, like the repressed, in its literature. But this return is not simply a repetition. Rather, it can be read as attempts at working through, what Freud called, "learning." (p. 54) Matthew Shepard’s murder needs working through, as the story of Anne Frank continues to be worked through. It is fair to ask, but why should we go over the brutalities again and again? What difference does it make? The question itself signals the tension between the desire to know and the passion for ignorance; but perhaps this is the place where liberatory learning is located in the psyche.           Britzman’s answer is hopeful, yet it does not minimize or smooth over the conflict. Education can be a "cure" for the reversals of love into hate, though one that recognizes how much is lost when we learn history as "a series of murders of people:" If education indeed can be a cure, it can be a cure only in the psychoanalytic sense: in creating new conditions for the capacity to love, to work, and to learn without invoking more harm and suffering. Conflict, in this story, will not go away. But what might be altered is our capacity to respond...Can the study of aggression consider "that other war," the internal conflict? (p. 129) The final chapter, "’That Lonely Discovery’: Anne Frank, Anna Freud, and the Question of Pedagogy," investigates the teaching of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and the controversies surrounding its publication. Here, Britzman again attends to the internal conflicts within a community as it struggles to represent to the outside world its version--or more precisely the version--of "difficult knowledge" (p. 117). Erik Erikson (1964) in, Insight and Responsibility, writes about "The First Psychoanalyst" and uses the phrase "lonely discovery" to describe Freud’s development of psychoanalysis. Britzman draws on Erikson’s phrase as a backdrop to her understanding of the lives and writings of Anne Frank and Anna Freud. But we might also think about how our own reading and teaching of the diary is another form of "lonely discovery."           Although Britzman is deeply interested in her subjects’ lives as Jewish women, her aim is not biography. Instead, she places their stories (Anna Freud’s writings and Anne Frank’s diary) into three kinds of time frames: "the time of the writing [of the diary], the time of finding and publishing the diary, and our own time of pedagogical engagement" (p. 114). In this way she explores, for example, how Frank’s story is read again and again and what might be learned at each reading.           Britzman thereby raises two large questions: "What project has the diary of Anne Frank been attached to in school curriculum? And how does the work of Anna Freud, and of psychoanalysis generally, open our thinking to the more difficult possibilities of our hopes for both the diary’s and our students’ places in the school curriculum?" (p. 117). Her investigation finds the places where private secrets are made public for an audience; today, mostly an audience of school children. She follows the dynamics of how this story was molded intentionally for an audience, by the writer and then by the publisher. For Britzman, serious ethical questions are raised by the act of writing one’s private, secret story and then willing it into history as a document that carries this story beyond itself.           Britzman finds that, "Otto Frank wanted his daughter’s diary to be a story of adolescence, not a Jewish story" (p. 121). But what did Anne Frank want? To this question Britzman provides this excerpt from the diary: "Of course," writes Anne Frank on march 29, 1944, "everyone pounced on my dairy. Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a novel about the Secret Annex.... Seriously, though, ten years after the war people would find it very amusing to read how we lived, what we ate, and what we talked about as Jews in hiding. Although I tell you a great deal about our lives, you still know very little about us." (p. 113) And what does Britzman want with providing yet another reading of Anne Frank? Anne Frank’s statement, "Although I tell you a great deal about our lives, you still know very little about us" haunts Britzman’s reading of the diary as she attempts to work through the psychic trauma contained in the diary’s pages. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl thus becomes a site of "contentious history:" For the young girl called "Anne Frank" does more than haunt the writings about Jewish European genocide, where one passes through Anne Frank on the way to the consideration of the sheer numbers; her reference appears in the most unexpected places: in book advertisements of adolescent diaries, in television sitcoms, in short stories, and in contemporary films. The figure of Anne Frank has been burdened with, at once, too much history, too much quota of affect. This chapter explores the contentious projections onto the figure of Anne Frank, which often travel under the name of history. (P. 114 - 115) Britzman asks further why this is the most widely read book on the Holocaust. Is it because, as Eleanor Roosevelt writes in her Introduction to Anne’s diary, "This is a remarkable book. Written by a young girl--and the young are not afraid of telling the truth--it is one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read" (p. vii). But there are no easy answers: Can the diary serve both as a universal coming of age story and as a voice for the vast numbers of murdered Jewish children? How do those not directly affected by the Holocaust encounter its meaning? And how do these unresolvable tensions structure the fault lines of our own unconscious pedagogical efforts? These haunting questions require a return to that first "lonely discovery": psychoanalytic investigation. (p. 125) In this chapter as in others, it is in this process of returning that Britzman turns to Anna Freud’s writing.           Britzman’s book is important for educators who are grappling with resistances to liberatory education. She brings new insight into why it is still extremely difficult to move beyond the tolerance/intolerance paradigm, or "month of..." or "foods of...," and into more authentic transformation. She offers a convincing argument for the centrality of psychoanalytic perspectives to pedagogical strategy and teaching generally. In spite of the critical political stance of much multicultural and anti-racist pedagogy, they often deny the psychodynamics of love and hate that structure the "passion for ignorance." Until we engage these dynamics, we cannot truly unlearn this world. References Britzman, D. P. (1987). Cultural myths in the making of a teacher: Biography and social structure in teacher education. In Okazawa-Rey, M., Anderson, J., and Traver, R. Teachers, Teaching, and Teacher Education. Reprint Series No. 19. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Review. Britzman, D.P. (1991). Practice makes practice: A critical study of learning to teach. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Erikson, E. H. (1964). Insight and responsibility. NY: W.W. Norton and Company. Frank, A. (1967) [1952]. Anne Frank: The diary of a young girl. Translated from the Dutch by B.M. Mooyaart. NY: Doubleday. Greene, M. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. NY: Teachers College Press, Columbia University. Levertov, D. (1987). Relearning the alphabet. In Poems 1968-1972. New York: New Directions Books. Maxwell, J. A. (1996). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. About the Reviewer Victoria I. Muñoz Victoria I. Muñoz is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wells College and the author of the book, Where "Something Catches": Work, Love, and Identity in Youth (SUNY-Press, 1995).