Learning Disability as a Refuge from Knowledge

Abstract

In this paper the author finds that an important factor preventing learning and development in learning disabled people is the way in which their learning disability can act as a refuge from knowledge. He begins by discussing how the very term 'Learning Disability', through obscuring the distinction between organic and psychological difficulties in learning, can itself become a refuge for those who use the term from facing the reality of damage and deficiency. Following this, he considers the development of psychological impairments to learning from a psychoanalytical perspective. He places particular emphasis on how the emotional consequences of a child's handicap, to the child him/herself and his/her parents, can affect the development of curiosity and learning. The author illustrates these ideas with clinical material from individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy with an adolescent boy with a learning disability.