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

The idea that educators love children is often taken for granted--even thought it's often the most common reason teacher education students give for getting into the profession. This collection brings together the work of educators, critical theorists, and clinical psychoanalysts as they explore the role of love in education. The contributors to this collection employ a psychoanalytic framework to examine issues including the absence of an official discourse pertaining to love and education; love and other emotions in forms of teaching and care-giving; and the intersection of love and the classroom. Among other things, the book argues that our failure to recognize emotions can surface in the form of conflicts in the classroom and elsewhere. The chapters, grounded in research, draw on autobiographical and narrative case studies.