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This book was first published in Argentina some thirty years ago and has been through a number of editions since. As the author tells us in her preface, this one is the first to appear in Spain for some years, whereas in Argentina there have been as many as five. The reason for the book's influence is in my view that it is a pioneering work in its field, at least in Spanish. The author must be credited as the first psychoanalyst to have turned her attention to the learning problems of intelligent children who are unable for emotional reasons to turn their intellectual capacity to positive account—or, as Isabel Luzuriaga puts it, who use their intellectual resources negatively for emotional reasons. The book could be described as a systematic study of the defence mechanisms that impede development and block the intellectual functions of thinking, judging and reasoning, thereby preventing these children from exercising their intelligence and impairing their capacity for learning and knowledge.
The book's theoretical background is that of the classical Kleinian school, although it is firmly