Nameless : understanding learning disability

Psychoanalysis has always striven to reconstruct damaged human subjectivity.

However, with a few exceptions, people with learning disabilities have long been excluded from this enterprise, as a matter of course.

It has been taken for granted that learning disability is a deficient state in which psychodynamics play but a minor role and where development is irrevocably determined by organic conditions.

First published in German in the 1980s and published here in English for the first time, this provocative book attempts to understand learning disabilities in terms of psychoanalysis and socio-psychology.

Controversially, the author does not distinguish between a primary organic handicap and a secondary psychological one; rather, she argues that it is developed from the very outset of the process of socialization during the interaction of care-giver and infant, and therefore gives the analyst room to work on this maladapted socialization.

She illustrates the effectiveness of this theory when put into practice in a number of case studies.