Early Development And Education Of The Child

By Willi Hoffer, ed. Marjorie Brierley. New York: Aronson, 1981, xvii + 220 pp., $20.00.

Marjorie Brierley, in collecting and editing these papers, has created

a mélange of significant scientific contributions and historical and biographical memoirs from the post-World-War I period. The purpose of this anthology is stated succinctly in Anna Freud's foreword. The collection and publication of an author's writings "more than any other acknowledgment … serve[s] to highlight the significance of a man's work for the discipline to which he has devoted his efforts."

The great division in Hoffer's life and writings occurred at the time of World War II and the exodus from Austria. He had the opportunity to observe and record with movies the infants and children of Miss Freud's war nurseries. His most creative work came from these observational studies of the borderland between biology and psychology and the psychoanalytic conclusions he was able to draw from them. Although the data from these studies are observational, one should keep in mind in reading this book that Hoffer firmly believed that "psychoanalysis is a representational science." These papers reveal his ability to synthesize psychoanalysis and infant observation.

Part I begins with "Mouth, Hand and Ego Integration" (1949) and includes papers and lectures developing the themes established in his first and principal paper on infant observations. Perhaps the single most creative working idea he developed from his observations was that of dual or multiple stimulations, which are self-generated when the infant touches his hand to his mouth. This concept enabled Hoffer to develop his ideas regarding differentiation of self from object and the development of the concept of the primordial ego as being a body ego. In the later papers he touches on the pain barrier and infantile narcissism that protect the infant from self-destructiveness. He presages Sandler's concept of background of safety when he speaks of