ABSTRACT
This chapter explores and discusses the psychodynamics of learning and teaching at a time of changing funding arrangements and priorities through students' accounts of their experience of university. It considers the contextual, organizational and socio-political characteristics implicated in these psychodynamic processes. Organizational and societal characteristics are implicated in psychodynamic processes as they provide the ideological, economic and "emotional" context in which these processes occur, as well as framing the parameters of potential individual and organizational responses. The psychoanalytic perspective enables to consider the ways in which students, teachers and the institutions in which they operate can protect themselves from the anxieties generated by their roles and interactions through the adoption of blocking and distorting defences, such as denial or transference. Defensive processes that become entrenched as organizational culture can act as powerful constraints that prevent organizations from achieving their core tasks.
