This tract was commissioned from Donald Meltzer and Martha Harris in
1976 by the Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development as part
of a project to develop policies and programmes that would support
families in their educational task. It was included in Sincerity:
Collected Papers of Donald Meltzer ed. A. Hahn (1994) but has never
until now been published as an independent work in English, though it
has been published in French, Spanish and Italian and has had extensive
use in those countries by therapists, teachers, teacher-trainers and
social workers.It is a unique work owing to its integration of a
psychoanalytical theory of learning with an ecological conception of how
the various systems involved in the educational process are
interconnected, and as such is still of great present-day relevance,
both to clinical and educational practitioners and to policy-makers.