Love's Return : Psychoanalytic Essays on Childhood, Teaching, and Learning

Teacher training is focused primarily on practical concerns, particularly on having authority disciplining groups of children who are often imagined by worried student teachers as aggressive, 'out of control' or disruptive.

At the same time, educators often cite a love of children as their chief motive for entering the teaching profession, and dream of being the beloved and esteemed figure idealized in popular films such as "To Sir With Love" (1967) or "Dead Poet's Society" (1989).

This psychoanalytical assessment of teacher education unpicks these notions of love and control, and looks deeper into the heart of these ideas to take account of motivations that are not usually considered in educational discourse, including ambivalence, sexuality, hatred, desire, projection and loss.

Bringing together insights from psychoanalysis and common themes in teaching practice, this groundbreaking book presents an important challenge to current trends in childhood studies as well as an intimate examination of the complex nature of love and teaching as it is simultaneously provoked and repressed by the current school environment.