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As a long-time teacher of academic writing, I can testify that beginning students do not understand academic theory, graduating students still have not mastered it, and the take-home lesson for most, on the basis of their university experience, is that an “academic question” is synonymous with a useless or pointless question. That such is the case does not seem to me the result of some lack in students' genetic make-up, in their gray matter, or in their cognitive capacities. Rather, I think the movement into academic theory entails on the part of the individual a difficult and sometimes painful psychological movement, one for which Hegel's phrase, the labor of the negative, is not entirely inappropriate.
I describe the psychological dimension of this labor of the negative through reference to self-psychology. Briefly and in the grossest term, self-psychological theory holds that individuals seek, in the world, objects (specifically selfobjects) that mirror and empathetically affirm their narcissistically informed and energized ideals and ambitions. If individuals are able to locate such objects, then they experience themselves as ongoing continuous wholes and as independent centers of initiative. If individuals, however, are unable to locate such objects, they may experience self-fragmentation with such attendant affects as anxiety, depression, and rage.
This is my premise: the movement into theory may require of students that they experience a degree of self-fragmentation or narcissistic wounding. In my work as a teacher of writing, I have come to recognize three broad categories of such wounding. These I will detail here. In fact, of course, these three responses are inter-related, and all three may indeed occur in any given student over the course of his development or in response to a single assignment. Roughly, these three responses may be described as (a) the rageful, (b) the listless or de-energized, and (c) as the anxious.
The rageful is perhaps the most obviou