Book Notices

CHILD ANALYSIS AND THERAPY. Edited by Jules Glenn with the assistance of Melvin A. Scharfman. New York: Aronson, 1978, xv + 759 pp., $30.00.

This large volume takes on a large assignment. Dr. Glenn aims to give us an up-dated work on child analysis as therapy and a few of its adjuncts and applications. To achieve that aim, the contributors examine and detail the technique of child analysis from two standpoints: from the psychical development achieved by the child at different psychosexual-phase levels—prelatency, latency, and preadolescence—detailing how that developmental level—Glenn says "developmental point of view"—influences technique; and cutting across developmental levels, by examining the psychoanalytic process in child analysis. The volume opens with two very readable historical chapters; Glenn provides an overview of child analytic technique and general principles of child analysis.

In the first of three chapters on the assessment of patients, I. Bernstein and A. M. Sax examine indications and contraindications for child analysis, offering assessment aspects of three prelatency- and three latency-age children. M. Silverman explores the developmental profile evolved at the Hampstead Clinic and points to the uniqueness and complexity of the tool provided us by Anna Freud. Acknowledged as too time consuming to be used with every clinical case, its application is enormously valuable for investigative, teaching, and other selective purposes, including its serving as an outline and guide to organizing and integrating analytic data. Its use in assessing treatment progress is as great as in diagnostic evaluation.

Erna Furman discusses the use of the nursery school for evaluation and points to the large difficulties inherent in evaluating the young child, the wealth of data required and the fact that diagnostic assessment is a "prolonged or even an ongoing process." Those of us who have observed children longitudinally in a nontreatment context would concu