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I would like to discuss what is commonly known as Attention Deficit Syndrome (Attention Deficit Disorder according to the DSM-IV) in psychoanalytic terms. To date, the response as to how to treat this disorder has came mainly from the biological sciences, which propose diverse hypotheses regarding chemical unbalance in the brain to explain it. The quasi-universal use of Ritalin is also part of the medical response. Other trends in the therapeutic field, more promising in our view, emphasize that a connection between biology and the environment is necessary to produce attention deficits. Stanley Greenspan (1997) and his collaborators maintain that this disorder—as well as many other types of functional disorders in early childhood ranging from behavioral and learning difficulties to thinking disorders—should be considered the result of the interaction between the inherited genetic traits of a child, and how his/her environment—i.e., parents or caregivers—respond to that particular biological configuration. Among those who think that intelligence is more that simply the capacity to pass a test or perform mathematics, he maintains that in the origins of intelligence, the emotional exchanges between the baby and the caregivers are crucial to mobilize brain pathways and early behaviors that result on the development of cognitive and social capacities. His perspectives on childhood development and childhood pathology, arising from a wealth of clinical experience, are interest and insightful, and they deserve closer examination. I shall refer to them later.
More and more, especially in industrialized societies, the medical domain is taking the lead in responding to the suffering of the subject. An increasing number of symptoms (depression, anxiety, phobias, enuresis, asthma, etc.) are being displaced from any psychic consideration and relocated in the supposedly more scientific domain: the brain, the genes, and the neurotransmitters are now the efficient causes explaining w