What Nursery School Teachers Ask Us About—Psychoanalytic Consultations in Preschools.: Edited by Erna Furman. Madison, Conn.: Int. Univ. Press, 1986, xvi + 247 pp., $32.00.

The transformation of psychoanalytic theory into principles of child rearing and education has long presented a seductive challenge to psychoanalysts, psychologists, and educators. Even more enticing than treating emotional illness is the prospect of facilitating the development of the "healthy" personality through the agency of parents and teachers. Anna Freud described the irresistible temptation to devise a "psychoanalytic education" that would prevent neurosis by eliminating those attitudes and actions identified in clinical work as pathogenic agents. To this end, theory and therapy early on were translated into prescriptions for parents and educators. Freud, himself, reproached the education of his day for concealing sexuality and failing to prepare young people for aggression. "In sending the young out into life with such a false psychological orientation, education is behaving as though one were to equip people starting on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian Lakes" (Civilization and its Discontents, S.E., 21, p. 134n). Increasingly, the nursery school (if not the nursery) has been assigned the task of providing the appropriate clothing and charting the proper course for life's expedition.

In the years since the early attempts to provide a "psychoanalytic education," theories of child development have moved beyond the reconstruction of childhood from the analyses of adults to data drawn from direct observation of children. Unlike earlier, more simplistic educational approaches based on a then new awareness of libidinal phases of development, contemporary early childhood education seeks to facilitate the mastery of developmental tasks specific to stages of emotional, social, and cognitive growth. From this vantage point