As the psychic life of reading is imbued with desire, transferences and other forms of emotional turbulence, readers invariably and often unconsciously project their anxieties, hopes and worries onto the lives of fictional characters. Using the lens of psychoanalytic theory, this article explores the meanings produced in the convergence of teacher education and collaborative experiences of reading. I examine how young adult literature, in particular, can foster a productive engagement with pre-service teachers' desires, fantasies and anxieties in learning to teach. Through shared encounters with fictional adolescence in Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games" and Sherman Alexie's "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian", I explore the transferential attachments and projective identifications that a group of pre-service teachers develop towards the texts they read, which enable them to work through the psychical challenges involved in becoming a teacher.