What else do students need?

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 touniversity and university staff is seen as being recruited into a personaldevelopmental context. It sketches some psychodynamic background for understandingthe role students unconsciously assign to staff, in terms of concepts such astransference, projection and containment. It makes connections between mechanismsfor early infancy social learning about self/identity and the identity-establishingresponses which students need at their stage too. It uses this understanding toexplain some of the difficulties which can be experienced in responding to troubledstudents. We can extrapolate from the more difficult end of the spectrum to informour general understanding about the dynamics of students’ need forresponsiveness and ‘help’, and the article finally brieflyconsiders ‘help’ and ‘problems’ as usuallybeing developmental rather than pathological agents of students’ learning process