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Rothstein and Glenn's Learning Disabilities and Psychic Conflict: A Psychoanalytic Casebook is a remarkable book; it is full of ideas and illustrative materials that are clearly presented, interestingly written, and highly worthwhile. Anyone interested in analysis, development, brain science—or any aspect of psychology, teaching, or mental health—will find profit and enjoyment in reading this book.
Eight analysts contribute nine case reports, mostly of thirty pages or so, of analytic work with people with learning disabilities. Five of the nine patients were children, one was an adolescent, and three were adults. The authors provide a discussion of about sixteen pages after each report. They summarize the cases, evaluate the available diagnostic testing as to findings and completeness, comment on any technical problems that arose in the work, and discuss the inter-relationships they perceive among definable, neurophysiologically based mental disabilities (as reflected in the psychological tests), developmental experiences, and transference and countertransference manifestations.
The authors show that specific limiting neurophysiologic givens (such as deficits in memory, impulse control, logical sequencing, the capacity to understand spatial relationships, and so on) influence development, and that psychological testing today can, to some extent, identify and quantify them. These givens also influence the perceptions of developmental events and the defensive and gratifying mental constructs that become characteristic of individuals as they establish their interactions with, and adaptations to, the world of objects and