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The following study reports the case of a boy who was able to do fourth grade work in all subjects except spelling and writing. In regard to the former he was about a second grade pupil, while in regard to the latter, not much better than a first grade one.
This case might be taken as evidence of an awakening interest from a psychoanalytical point of view in the various failures of pupils in our public schools. Public school teachers, educational-psychologists, and educators in general have attempted for a long time to solve the mysteries of school failures, especially where the disturbing factors could not be blamed on lack of sufficient ability, but rarely have clinical psychologists and the psychoanalysts tried their hands at any diagnoses and corrections.
To a great many observant workers it is becoming clear that the “law of exercise” or the “law of use and disuse,” which is forwarded as the most fundamental law of learning by the majority of psychologists, will either have to be extended, modified, or entirely set aside in order to account for certain kinds of learning and particular types of forgetting. In this case it will be seen that the patient was able to spell words, after certain inhibitory factors were removed, which had been to all intents and purposes forgotten. The return of the ability to spell these words was not due to any practice of the bonds involved for the patient was not told how to spell the words which he had apparently forgotten. The return of the ability was rather due to the withdrawal of certain forces operating that caused the words, which were related to the various conflicts, to be continually misspelled. Even Thorndike's addition, the “law of effect,” is too confining, at least the way he advances it.
No new laws are going to be formulated in this paper, but as the reader progresses through the following case, possibly the shortcomings of the commonly accepted laws of learning will become evident, for it is plain that the “law of ex