Novel Education

Book excerpt: What is a novel education like? The surprising reply supposes that fiction affects the crisis of understanding work within the human professions of teaching and psychoanalysis. The studies of learning and not learning presented begin with the delicate surprise made from representing affective experiences and conflicts within self/other relations. Freud's question of presenting psychoanalysis to others, and the accidental pedagogy made, continues to animate our debates on the uses of affected learning. Novel Education analyzes the perils and pleasures of inviting, narrating, and interpreting emotional experience in learning and not learning. Drawing upon contemporary psychoanalytic debates on the relation between understanding and therapeutic action, these studies open discussion on the unusual world of psychoanalytic methods and link free association and the transference to the aesthetic conflicts made from thinking about sexuality, and the difficulties of inhibition in learning, listening, and the teacher's memory of remembering learning to teach. Novel Education highlights a discussion of the teacher's depression and the difficulty of formulating subjective knowledge from practices, philosophies, and theories in the human professions. It raises the question of how fields of thought and practice affect themselves. How may we describe the human idiom made in pedagogical and psychoanalytic relationships? And why join learning to not learning? This thought-provoking book is essential reading on a broad range of fields for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty members.