You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This paper addresses some issues in the regulation of self-esteem among adolescents with specific learning disability.
To those working with the learning disabled, self-esteem is an ever-present, if somewhat hard to define, topic. Special educators and mental health professionals who treat learning-disabled children and adolescents will often remark on the low self-esteem of their students and patients, and/or the strong correlation that effective self-esteem regulation often seems to have with successful remediation of the learning problem. The learning disabled, it is often averred, have low self-esteem; the learning-disabled child's or adolescent's low self-esteem, we are often told, is an impediment to effective remediation of his or her learning problem (see, for example, Bat-Hayim 1997, Burka 1983, Chapman 1988, Greene 1987). But their truth or usefulness aside, these generalities beg a set of larger and, it seems to me, more important questions: What is there about a learning disability that affects self-esteem? What are the processes by which a learning disability affects the individual's self-esteem? How do these factors interact with other maturational and developmental factors in the dynamics of self-esteem?
Before entering into a discussion of self-esteem and its vicissitudes in the learning disabled, it will be important to briefly review some definitions and discussions of the concept in the psychological and psychoanalytic literature. By necessity, this will be only a brief and schematic review of the concept, which, itself, can best be understood in the context of other, equally important and equally hard-to-define concepts, such as that of the self. Of course, if a full review of the concept of self-esteem is beyond the scope of this paper, then a review of the concept of the self is also certainly beyond our purview.