A Survey of Learning Difficulties in Children

In the last few years an increasing number of children who have difficulties in learning their school work have been referred to child psychiatrists and child psychoanalysts. This increase in problems of learning may be real or it may be an apparent one. I have been informed that such difficulties were encountered only occasionally in Europe, with the exception of England, so that some of these problems, particularly reading problems, may be inherent in the difficulties in learning to read, write and spell the English language. It is true also that in this part of the United States the school laws compel the attendance of the entire child population up to the age of either sixteen or eighteen years. This means that many children, who are really not capable of higher learning, have to try and their failures may increase the relative high percentage of these difficulties. In recent years psychologists and educators tend to regard the majority, if not all, of the children who seem to have difficulty in learning their school work as suffering from neurotic problems and to refer them to child psychiatrists and to child psychoanalysts.

Whether this increase in the number of cases of learning difficulties is real or is only apparent, because of the reasons I have mentioned, it is true that more and more cases of learning difficulties are being referred to child psychoanalysts. This is a step in the right direction. Liss (1949) states that every child who shows any form of steeple-like or valley-like learning patterns requires an evaluation by a psychoanalyst. It is important that those psychoanalysts who specialize in the psychoanalysis of children have a broad knowledge of the factors which may produce such problems and of how they may be cured.

In this paper I have tried to bring together the concepts about these problems which I have formed from a survey of the literature1 and from