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This book is designed by the editors to be a companion volume to their earlier (1972) Childhood Psychopathology, and like it, is an anthology. The earlier book, the editors tell us, is a collection of classic readings. This one is an anthology of what are considered to be "the past decade's key publications" (p. xi), devoted to "the major psychopathological categories" (p xii).
It is no surprise, therefore, that many of the 23 papers in this sourcebook have little to do with psychopathology or only deal with issues of illness peripherally. The emphasis is on development "highlighting those biopsychosocial [my italics] variables that have received increasing attention in recent years" (p. xii), and it is an emphasis which is largely uninformed by and unconcerned with analytic data and methodology.
Some of the papers contain data and ideas which truly are new, and some are merely recent restatements in new terms of old material. All, however, are current, and many are in vogue. Psychoanalysis, one might gather from reading this book, is not in vogue—although there are several papers by analysts or using an analytic framework. The thrust of these is developmental (with the exception of Martha Wolfenstein's poignant and excellent paper "How Is Mourning Possible?" wherein she develops the thesis that children are unable to mourn before they have undergone the separation from their parents of adolescence, which constitutes a "trial mourning," where the object remains in reality). Among this group is Margaret Mahler's well-known "Symbiosis and Individuation: The Psychological Growth of the Human Infant"; Selma Fraiberg's "Insights from the Blind: Comparative Studies of Blind and Sighted Infants," which demonstrates the importance of vision in the ego development of the child; Katrina de Hirsch's "Early Language Development," which does the same for language; and the stimulating and provocative paper by Theodore Shapiro and Richard Perry, "Latency Revisited: The Ag