ABSTRACT
In Chapter 13, I return to the role of the teacher as a witness who needed a witness. I elaborate upon popular educational concepts of authenticity and presence and consider these through the relational psychoanalytic themes developed in the book. In recognition of the interplay of nonconscious, unconscious, and conscious knowing, we confront the difficulty of ethicality in the inevitable opacity of a self to oneself. To address many of the issues that confront teachers, I draw from a plethora of personal examples: a vignette of rupture and repair in the classroom; individualised psychoanalytically informed responses to students in jargon-free language; activities for prospective teachers designed to expand their example space of experience; and an example of a transference-countertransference enactment in my own practice. The essence of this chapter is to show how the preparation of teachers might begin to look, were it informed by relational psychoanalytic understandings.
