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Because I had found it hard to attend to anything less interesting than my thoughts, I was difficult to teach. — Yeats
That learning readiness shows a wide range of individual variation is well known. The close connection between the ebbing off of the oedipal conflict and readiness for more systematic learning in school has often been observed and stated. The recognition has grown that the events of the preoedipal period are likewise important. Depending on the developments in both phases, readiness appears at an earlier or later age and in differing degrees.
In addition to this interindividual variation, there is also an intraindividual variation: the same child may show a quite different degree of learning ability or blocking in different fields, especially in the two basic areas of conceptual learning which he encounters in the early school years—reading and arithmetic.
This disparity is the starting point of the present paper. We shall try to show how different constellations in the preoedipal period and differences in the effort to resolve the oedipal conflict, as preserved in autobiographical writings, influence the ability for and interest in arithmetical learning. We are thinking here of basic mathematical learning, in which geometry usually plays little role. Higher learning and original work in mathematics—which may involve quite specific endowment—is essentially outside the scope of this paper. The development of a man like Hardy (1940), who says, "I cannot remember ever having wanted to be anything but a mathematician, " is obviously quite different from that of most people, who encounter mathematics as merely one subject in school. We will, however, refer to the life histories of mathematicians where they appear to present pertinent material.