The Western medico-psychological model of learning difficulties assumes that intellectual incompetences are basic to this classification. However, on closer examination, the category of people with learning difficulties is so heterogeneous, as regards the competences of its members, how they perceive themselves and how they are regarded by others, as to appear to have no genuine basis of cohesion, certainly not in specifiable intellectual abilities and disabilities. This raises the question of whether there are other reasons for their categorisation in this manner.

This question can initially be addressed by considering how categorisation as someone with learning difficulties affects other social identities, in particular the achievement of social adulthood. The various difficulties that people with learning difficulties face in acquiring implicit recognition as adults in Western society, many of which are only marginally related to intellectual incompetences, raise questions about the relationship of these two social identities: learning difficulties and adulthood. There are very great differences between these two identities both in the ways in which they affect the lives of young adults with learning difficulties and the manner in which they are discussed and understood by people with learning difficulties and those close to them. Among the group of young people with learning difficulties whom I came to know in the course of research on their transition to adulthood, most claimed that they were indeed adults. They and their parents participated in a discourse about their adulthood which originated in a normalising philosophy of care promulgated mainly by the social services.