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Joe Palombo, who passed away in June 2023, was possessed of many gifts, honed over a career spanning more than six decades. His contributions as a master clinician and teacher were both significant and enduring, as was his leadership in the establishment of the Institute for Clinical Social Work.
He was a major contributor to the psychology of the self as an author, educator, and clinician. His published work comprises 63 papers and 4 books, including a seminal paper, written in 1976, in which he applied the teachings of Heinz Kohut to clinical social work practice. With a unique educational background in philosophy and clinical social work, Joe was perhaps best known for his groundbreaking work on the disorders of the self that often accompany neuropsychological deficits in children, adolescents, and adults, having published two books and countless papers on this topic.
He was Founding Dean of the Institute for Clinical Social Work in Chicago and the Distinguished Director Emeritus of the Joseph Palombo Center for Neuroscience and Psychoanalytic Social Work, which is affiliated with ICSW. Joe was also a founding member of this journal’s Editorial Board, on which he served with distinction for over thirty years, and in which he periodically published both papers and essays.
In this Special Issue, we are pleased to offer three papers that honor the passion, intellectual commitment, and creativity that Joe Palombo brought to his work as a scholar, teacher, and social work clinician.
In the first contribution, titled “Learning difficulties through three lenses,” three senior clinicians provide differing perspectives on their work with individuals who have struggled with learning differences. Viewed through three distinctive foci—those of educational therapy, the treatment of adult-diagnosed learning differences, and the treatment of trauma in children and adults—their discussions lead to transformative work with their clients as they incorporate these different vantage poi