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Those students and teachers who want to know more about goes on, or fails to go on, within their classrooms will find Deborah Britzman's book a thought provoking and challenging resource. Unlike other texts that have addressed familiar problems in feminist pedagogy (for example, Gendered Subjects: Dynamics of Feminist Teaching, or Without a Word: Teaching Beyond Women's Silence,(f.1) books to which Britzman curiously never refers), Lost Subjects, Contested Objects offers us a theory of why we should expect to encounter the problems we encounter. Not limiting herself to is unique to feminist pedagogy, Britzman draws on an impressive array of educational and psychoanalytic theory to provide a broader view of the field of itself. Like other feminist engagements with pedagogy, Britzman's helps us to understand classroom dynamics, but her emphasis on learning as a psychic event both extends and complicates our knowledge.Central to Britzman's argument is the idea that education involves interference, a concept borrowed from Anna Freud. Unsettling dreams of smooth development and mastery, education is necessarily and inevitably disturbing, steeped in conflict. Education interferes with the subject's desire for uninterrupted pleasure to impose the pain and discipline of learning. Psychoanalysis interferes with education's self-representation as development, progress and mastery, revealing its blind spots, failures and exclusions. Like the psychoanalyst, Britzman reads the return of the pedagogical repressed: The lost subjects in the title refer to the repressed psychic events of teaching and learning, which return to haunt education in the form of its contested objects: as conflicts, as disruptions, as mistakes, and as controversies (p. 19).Britzman's main concern is to put education on the analyst's couch (and that includes students, teachers, theories, methods, and contents) in order to study what education cannot tolerate knowing (p. 61). Despite previous encouragement by Sandor Ferenczi (1908) and Maxine Greene (1965), education has been unable to tolerate are the dynamics of love and hate that make any possible. Britzman contends that without an analysis of these dynamics education's normative investments in non-conflicted will continue to dominate the field and will continue to avoid addressing the knowledge of how love, hate, conflict, pain, loss, resistance, and desire are part of as well as part of life (p. 133).Making knowledge and one's relationship to it a topic of discussion is a difficult task, but one that Britzman has handled well. Her book deserves to be read by all educators, perhaps especially those whose prejudicial views of psychoanalysis have led them to avoid it at all costs. Among other things, this book itemizes those costs, which are extensive. Britzman wants to make education into different than repression and normalization, something that is capable of surprising itself, something interested in risking itself (p. 58). Consequently, this is a book for those who love learning, not for those in search of mastery, an easy life, or teaching awards.Chapter 1 sets out Britzman's own theories of learning, but in ways that get more fully developed and more clearly expressed in subsequent chapters. Although her initial questions are striking (I particularly like, What obscure relations work within the capacity to think, to live, to love, and to dream as if were the self's own work of art? [p. 24]), they require the elaboration offered in subsequent chapters. This is accomplished through discussions of Maxine Greene's educational vision (Chapter 2); of the ways that education shuts down sexual curiosity, and how that process might be reversed (Chapter 3); of queer pedagogy and its new reading practices (Chapter 4); of problems in antiracist pedagogy (Chapter 5); and of the importance of history, memory, and loss to any pedagogical endeavour (Chapter 6). …