Nameless: Understanding Learning Disability (Electronic book text)

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.