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Date: | Thu, 13 Feb 1997 22:34:58 -0500 |
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Dear Bob,
Here's a very interesting, rare article on a case of an analysis of man
with a learning disability:
Kafka, E. "Cognitive difficulties in psychoanalysis." Psychoanalytic
Quarterly 53 (1984): 533-550.
There's also an article on learning problems and treatment by Daniel Gensler
in Contemporary Psychoanalysis about three years ago. I'm not sure if this
is the type of disability you mean, but its an interesting area with next to
no literature in terms of psychodynamics, which is very unfortunate given the
large amount of people who have subtle or not subtle processing disorders,
whether language based, spatial, motor, etc. My feeling is a fair amount of
so-called intractable resistance in psychoanalytic treatment and treatment
impasses arise when a patient's modes of processing doesn't match with the
analyst's and the analyst misperceives the nature of the cognitive
difference- easily misnamed problems with symbolization (descriptively
accurate byt not because of Kleinian or other psychodynamics necessarily) or
worse "the difficult patient" or vaguely named ego deficits. When cognitive
impairments are understood in purely psychological terms its a form of
malpractice and mistreatment. Child therapists are somewhat better aware of
these issues, adult therapists/analysts very little. One person in the
psychoanalytic literature who knows a lot about these issues is Stanley
Greenspan, who discusses processing disorders at various points in a number
of his books _ The Development of the Ego; Developmentally Based
Psychotherapy; Infancy and Early Childhood, and his has just started a new
journal about learning disabilities through I.U.P. Others out there
interested in this?
Tom Rosbrow
San Francisco
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