Literacy Difficulties: A Psychoanalytic Approach.

Main Article Content

Javier Sandoval-Berrios

Abstract

This article offers an interpretive reading of literacy learning difficulties from a psychoanalytic perspective, challenging their reduction to instrumental, cognitive, or deficit-based explanations. Drawing on psychoanalytic and psychopedagogical theory, it argues that learning cannot be understood as a mere acquisition of skills, but rather as an experience shaped by the desire to know, the separating function, symbolic inscription, and the subject’s position in relation to the Other. In this framework, literacy difficulties may be conceived not only as school-based obstacles, but also as symptoms, inhibitions, or singular subjective responses to the demand for knowledge. The article critically examines perspectives that prematurely pathologize non-learning and instead proposes considering the relational, familial, and school-based dynamics that give these manifestations meaning. To this end, conceptual analysis is articulated with a brief clinical vignette that illustrates how literacy failure may be read as an expression of a particular libidinal economy and a specific relationship to language, the body, and the law. The article concludes that psychoanalysis contributes to a more complex understanding of the issue by opening a space for listening that makes it possible to historicize the symptom and avoid diagnostic closure.

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Papers

How to Cite

Literacy Difficulties: A Psychoanalytic Approach. (2026). Edupsykhé. Revista De Psicología Y Educación, 23(3), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.57087/edupsykhe.v23i3.5210