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This book is a small volume that may easily be read in a single night, all the more so because the author has seen fit to write it in a lucid, simple prose. Perhaps the fact that he started his career as a petroleum technologist rather than as a professional mental health worker had something to do with it. At any rate, the absence of the usual convoluted thinking and obfuscating style is very refreshing. The subject of the book is the emotionally disturbed delinquent adolescent boy who is on his way to becoming a hardened criminal.
In 1934, after having acquired considerable knowledge of human behavior through persistent and wide reading of the psychoanalytic pioneers, Mr. Shaw founded the Red Hill school, a pioneering institution exclusively for the treatment of delinquent boys. The school was founded because of the author's deep belief in the changeability of human nature through the medium of love and understanding applied by means of the psychoanalytic method. The school is a small place, with only 55 students at any one time, located in the countryside near London. Criteria for the selection of the children to be admitted are quite strict. The candidates must be accessible to psychotherapy or psychoanalysis; they must possess IQ's of 130 or over; they must not be too schizoid, psychopathic, or overtly psychotic; and they must have attained the age of eleven. The school itself is organized as a boarding school, and for the most part, the staff members live in the same buildings the children do. This makes the atmosphere more Horney and accepting. Since the children have problems with adults (authorities), the staff insists that “We have to love the children as they are, not as we would prefer them to be.” Or, in Horneyan ter