ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysts vary in their explanations of failure to learn. Sigmund Freud, for instance, linked the stifling of sexual curiosity in children, by parents, to later difficulties in learning. If a child is made to feel guilty for being curious about the fundamental sexual facts of life, then other questions may feel too dangerous to ask. The Kleinian approach differs from these in that it ascribes learning difficulties, at least in part, to the infant's inherent aggression. According to Melanie Klein, the infant is born ready to relate to a satisfying object. Klein is not too clear on her dating of the all-important 'femininity complex', but this seems to occur at around two years and its repercussions fan out into the developing Oedipus complex. Klein believed Dick was schizophrenic and proceeded undaunted with psychoanalytic treatment. Wilfred Bion was the first post-Kleinian psychoanalyst to extend the Platonic possibilities of Klein's theory of early object relations.
