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In the wealth of literature by educators, psychologists, neurologists, and psychoanalysts dealing with the problem of reading difficulty, much attention has been focused on the underlying emotional causes on the one hand, and on the problems of vision on the other. The vision machines in reading centers attest to the great interest in visual problems and the bibliographies appended to articles on reading difficulty attest to the interest in the emotional factors. Albert J. Harris, of the Educational Clinic, Queens College, New York, suggested the need for the description and classification of the different kinds of emotional patterns to be found in reading disability cases:
If it is found that there are several main types of personality configuration in reading disabilities, other related problems would become capable of solution. One such problem is the significance of family pattern or home environment in the causation of reading problems. [Helen] Robinson's finding [1949] that unfavorable family conditions are one of the two most frequent causal factors should be followed up. Enough research has been done to show that no particular family pattern accounts for reading disability in general. It may turn out, however, that a particular kind of emotional blocking is strongly associated with a particular kind of family set-up [Harris, 1954].
Whereas variety rather than uniformity supposedly characterizes the adjustment patterns of a group of poor readers, I should like to suggest that there is a certain uniformity rather than variety that characterizes the underlying unconscious factors in reading. The above-mentioned two most frequent causal factors, unfavorable