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Nick Tingle's Self-Development and College Writing utilizes psychoanalytic theory to present an effective analysis of the subjective issues facing college students and composition faculty in contemporary writing courses. Tingle's central thesis is that in order for students to become productive writers of academic prose, they must pass through a difficult stage of psychological development. Drawing primarily from the works of Heinz Kohut and Robert Kegan, Tingle develops a convincing psychological and cultural theory of student learning. Moreover, this work is one of the first texts in the field of composition to combine an attention to the subjectivity of composing students with a close examination of the subjectivity of writing teachers.
According to Tingle, when composition faculty ask their students to enter into academic discourse, these teachers are motivating their students to take on a new relationship with language, and this new relationship requires a developmental shift requiring a destabilizing change in identity and cognition. In other terms, learning to master academic prose does not only require learning new cognitive skills; rather, the types of writing that we often want our students to perform is dependent on the ability of students to move to a higher level of consciousness, and this developmental move is fraught with anxiety for both the students and their teachers. In short, academic writing requires students to give up their commonsense understandings of culture and language in order to grasp a more theoretical and abstract conception of reality.
Since Tingle sees the movement towards academic writing as highly destabilizing and anxiety-provoking, he turns to the field of Self-Psychology and to the notion that the classroom is a holding environment or transitional space. The key to this theory of learning and psychological development is the role played by the teacher's empathy in supporting the student through the difficult task of reaching beyo