Book Notices

NORMALITY AND PATHOLOGY IN CHILDHOOD: ASSESSMENTS OF DEVELOPMENT. By Anna Freud. New York: International Universities Press, 1966, xii + 273 pp., $5.00.

It is difficult to describe the manner in which the author's vast knowledge of child psychology has been systematized and condensed without the slightest sacrifice of readability or clarity. The book is divided into six chapters: 1. "The Psychoanalytic View of Childhood: Long Distance and Close-up." Here the three approaches to the investigation of childhood are outlined—reconstruction from adult analyses, direct observation of children, and child analysis proper. In Chapter 2, "The Relations between Child Analysis and Adult Analysis," the similarities and differences are made clear. 3. "The Assessment of Normality in Childhood" discusses such matters as the early detection of pathogenic agents, areas of differences between child and adult, developmental lines, and regression as a principle in normal development, the lastnamed concept constituting one of the author's noteworthy contributions to this field. 4. "Assessment of Pathology," Part I, takes up descriptive versus metapsychological assessments, static versus developmental terminology, criteria for assessing severity of illness, assessment by development, by type of anxiety and conflict and by general characteristics. It contains a schema for drawing up a metapsychological profile of the child. Chapter 5, Part II, continuing with assessment of pathology takes up "Some Infantile Prestages of Adult Psychopathology." The author discusses the infantile neuroses, developmental disturbances, dissociality, delinquency and criminality, homosexuality and other perversions as diagnostic categories in childhood. The final chapter is devoted to therapy, in which Anna Freud discusses certain suggested modifications, urging caution about narrowing the therapeutic procedure before a thoroughgoing assessment of the personality, which can be arrived at only throu