Contemporary Psychoanalytic Approaches to Early Childhood Education

This very engaging, substantial, and accessible volume not only demonstrates why and how teachers, educators, and care professionals benefit from psychoanalytic understandings of children, but it also offers genuine practice examples that show how such understanding can make a difference. Ranging from case studies to critiques of the pressures brought down on teachers from curricula and schoolification imperatives to examples of teacher education seminar programs, this book will be a vital resource for early educational trainers and students alike.

-- Erica Burman, The University of Manchester

With twenty-first-century children experiencing an unprecedented mental health crisis bookended by the post-9/11 threats of terrorism and the post-pandemic assaults of a rapidly warming world, threats of school violence, intrusive social media, and crushing loneliness, today’s educators must be conversant with emotions in ways never anticipated. Although generic ’socio-emotional learning’ is a commonly heard prescription, it tends to be delivered more like a product than an experience. In contrast, this exciting volume of interdisciplinary perspectives illustrates the transformational potential of freshly perceived classroom dynamics for students and teachers alike. The contributors offer a mode of observation―one that opens up highly standardized and prescriptive educational methods to the possibility of novelty, play, relationship, and authentic growth that can come from applying psychoanalytic theories, practices, and methods. The most important is helping students and educators listen to one another in non-linear ways. Psychoanalytically trained practitioners will also benefit from this new way of approaching children’s struggles to learn, and the challenges families face in supporting their children’s efforts in non-pathologizing ways.

-- Billie A. Pivnick, William Alanson White Insti