Learning disabilities in a developmental perspective

The article presents an illustration of learning disabilities as symptoms of a psychological and affective development hampered by interrelated dysfunctional intrapsychic and context variables. Specifically, learning disabilities and difficulties would represent conditions of impaired access to the possibility of making the self more efficient in its function of distributing the motivational and cognitive resources required for realizing the objectives the subject pursues. When some objectives, for example school tasks, overlap with developmental objectives (development of a mature social and personal identity) and the latter are experienced in contradictory and ambivalent ways, or even as a threat, learning disabilities can be the solution found by the subject. To make school learning difficult can represent a way for buying time or suspending it, as in the case of those inhibitions that can become school phobias.

Keywords: Adolescence, learning disabilities, developmental tasks, development of the self, reflexive function

katia Provantini, Dario Cuccolo, Focus: Apprendimento, la complessità nella relazione terapeutica. Le difficoltà di apprendimento in una prospettiva evolutiva in "RICERCA PSICOANALITICA" 2/2018, pp 9-34, DOI: 10.3280/RPR2018-002002