Making the Passionate Mind: An Inquiry into Mental Health and Crisis in Education

This dissertation investigates the passionate qualities of emotional life for the challenges they pose to theories of teaching, learning, and mental health in education. While orientations to mental health frequently manifest in the phantasy of mastery over the mind and the body, this dissertation offers an orientation that conceives of the unknown qualities of the mind from the vantage of unconscious life. Drawing on Julia Kristevas study of passion and maladies and Deborah Britzmans theory of education as an emotional situation, the dissertation offers a study of breakdowns in emotional life as a site for investigating the passionate qualities of teaching and learning. This research investigates such moments of breakdown through a study of three figurations: the mad student, the mad group, and the mad teacher. Through each, the research interprets phantasies of mastery, compliance, omnipotence, control, and cure as unconscious responses to narratives of passionate object relating. Methodologically, the investigation makes use of aesthetic objects, namely film, to interpret phantasies that passionately drive meaning-making even as they also threaten this creative work. The research posits the passionate mind as what binds education to its unconscious underside and argues that education may support mental health by allowing both time and space for its symbolization.