ABSTRACT
Although counselling now forms the main body of my work, I have taught A-level English for fifteen years and have been struck by how many students fail to fulfil their academic potential because of essaywriting anxiety. As a teacher, I have spent considerable time explaining the mechanics of essay production. Often such explanations have sufficed. Yet often they have not. In such instances, I, as much as the student, have been left with a sense of frustration, impotence, despair. It has been the frequent failure of this essentially cognitive approach, together with the uncomfortable residue of feelings that have accompanied it, that has prompted me to investigate students’ essay-writing difficulties with psychodynamic rather than pedagogic eyes.
