Incoherent self‐narratives and disorders of the self in children with learning disabilities

Educators currently are giving considerable attention to the diagnosis and remediation of children with learning disabilities. The integration into clinical social work of this body of knowledge and experience presents a major challenge. The task of understanding the impact on development of neurocognitive delays, distortions, and deficits has just begun. In this paper I review the major paradigms of learning disabilities, and discuss those psychoanalytic developmental theories that have attempted to integrate the concept of neurocognitive differences in endowment into their frameworks. I then offer a developmental perspective based on selfpsychology and the narrative metaphor to assess the impact on children's development of differences in their endowment. A case illustrates a theme in the self‐narrative of a child with a learning disability.