"In depressive dramas our students are likely to oscillate between two roles. On the one hand they can function for us as “substitute parents who are to be impressed [and] excited” but whose “boredom, … censure, and … turning away constitute an enduring threat and challenge.” On the other hand, as they stand in for ourselves as children, we in the role of their parent will “censure [our] beloved children for their ignorance” and “love and respect them for their efforts to meet [our] highest expectations” (Tomkins 228-29, emphasis added). Or to recast the teaching situation in terms of a psychoanalytic encounter: sometimes I feel like my students’ analyst; other times, floundering all too visibly in my helplessness to evoke language from my seminar, I feel like a patient being held out on by 20 psychoanalysts at once."