What else do students need?

Abstract

This article considers university staff’s place in students’ worlds from a psychodynamic perspective. It looks at ‘studenthood’ as a psychological stage, in which relationship to university and university staff is seen as being recruited into a personal developmental context. It sketches some psychodynamic background for understanding the role students unconsciously assign to staff, in terms of concepts such as transference, projection and containment. It makes connections between mechanisms for early infancy social learning about self/identity and the identity-establishing responses which students need at their stage too. It uses this understanding to explain some of the difficulties which can be experienced in responding to troubled students. We can extrapolate from the more difficult end of the spectrum to inform our general understanding about the dynamics of students’ need for responsiveness and ‘help’, and the article finally briefly considers ‘help’ and ‘problems’ as usually being developmental rather than pathological agents of students’ learning process.