Introduction: Minding a gap

Abstract

As Tony Brown and Mark Murphy suggest, there might well be forms of therapeutic compensatory practice in education that may strip the latter of intellectual and personal challenge. The focus was to engage in discussing the applications of psychoanalysis, broadly defined, to education, in its widest sense, including adult and lifelong learning and higher education as well as schooling. The phrase “minding a gap” is borrowed from an important book by Frosh, which addressed another gulf, that between mainstream psychology and psychoanalysis. Psychology had become, in its mainstream variants, overly concerned with what might be termed the “syntax” of human behaviour, establishing general rules and principles underlining this, to the neglect of “semantics” and the meaning of actions to people themselves. In Germany, for instance, the German Educational Research Association, unlike its British Educational Research Association counterpart, has a psychoanalytic interest group. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.