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At a time when more and more is being written on the topic of learning disabilities, the scope of interdisciplinary interest is widening, and diagnostic refinements for the disorder are proliferating, it's a pleasure to find a chronicle of psychoanalytic contributions to the field. Learning Disabilities and Psychic Conflict: A Psychoanalytic Casebook is a fine, stout book, buttressed with excellent scholarship and thoughtful clinical data and so skillfully organized that readers can easily sample the material in several dimensions.
Delivering exactly what the title promises, the authors have assembled 9 extensive case histories of patients with learning disabilities from 8 psychoanalysts; 1 anonymous contributor has written about 2 patients. The ages of the patients range from five children aged 5 to 8 at the beginning of treatment to one adolescent and three adults. Each account is followed by the authors' thorough critiques, and the volume is bracketed with 2 introductory chapters, a discussion of “Clinical, Theoretical, and Technical Issues in the Analysis of Patients with Learning Disabilities” (p. 9) and a review of the literature (pp. 37) and closes with a tightly reasoned conclusion (p. 461). Six of the contributors are physicians, one a psychologist, and one a social worker, and of the seven identified contributors, six are listed as active members of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and three are certified in child analysis.
Plainly, the clinicians were free to report idiosyncratically: The