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It is often said of a child, on his first starting school, that he is lazy or inattentive, stupid, a dunce or playing dumb. But it is difficult to understand (a polite way of not sayving “I'm adunce myself”) whether the child really is stupid or only acting so, and in the latter case what the reason is. This book makes a number of noteworthy contributions towards finding the right answer to this question. It stems from the activities of a specialized centre for the study of intellectual inhibition of which G. Fara is the Director and it consists of papers presented at a convention on this subject.
The authors are either psychologists or qualified doctors; only some are members of the SPI (Italian Psychoanalytical Society) but all are close to the psychoanalitic approach and the field of Developmental Psychology. The focus is on the interaction between affectivity and thought processes and the field of observation is the clinical situation. As we shall see, some of the authors adhere strictly to the theme while others approach it from neighbouring fields of research; this ensures a broad survey of the subject. Given the number and breadth of their researches I have chosen to concentrate here on those contributions most directly related to the book's title and to gloss over the rest to avoid tediousness.
The first definition of intellectual inhibition as “The difficulty and, at times, impossibility of making use of given intellectual capabilities” is a point of departure for a lengthy series of reflections. These lead to a second definition which offers further clarification of the issue: “the difficulty, varying in gravity, in making use of given intellectual capabilities, where the gap between actual performance and hypothetical potentialities can be inferred from signs indicating a condition of suffering and of active conflict in the area or areas of impaired efficiency; the signs indicative of suffering and active conflict are not usually discernible on superficial