When History Returns

<p><b>Turns to theories and cultural representations of psychosocial life to reflect on and better understand the challenges of learning in times of social strife.</b></p><p><i>When History Returns</i> brings together psychoanalytic theories of learning with the antinomies of social strife. From a psychoanalytic perspective history returns through transitional scenes of inheriting a past one could not make experiencing a present affected by what came before and facing a future one can neither know nor predict. Taking such scenes as the subject of education Deborah P. Britzman provides new approaches and vocabulary for conceptualizing experience and understanding as expressed in psychoanalysis literature film clinical case studies and warm pedagogy. Britzman argues that novel quests for humane responsibility take hold in the fallout of understanding in the feel of history in imaginative dialogues and missed encounters and in searches for friendship belonging and affiliation. Each chapter charts these quests in contemporary education carrying readers into the heart of learning and the emotional situations that urge the transitions of difficult knowledge into care for thinking and the questions that follow.</p>