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This article describes the learning experiences of a six-year-old girl, Lutfa, over the course of a school year. It addresses Lutfa's struggles with mastery of the processes of reading and writing. Observational material is presented from the author's own literacy support work with Lutfa, together with classroom observations. The article argues that children's literacy learning can be illuminated by considering its social and emotional context. It conceptualises a child's learning identity as simultaneously constructed within intra-personal, interpersonal and socio-historical domains. It describes an unconscious dimension to these domains and further suggests that through the process of transference, the object-world of the classroom is given a specific emotional colouring and resonance for the individual. The article develops the idea of an unconscious ‘matrix for learning’, through which a task such as literacy learning is experienced. It then explores this matrix as experienced by one child. The article concludes by reviewing the complex and subtle interplay that occurred between the intra-personal, interpersonal and socio-historical contexts of literacy learning in Lutfa's case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]