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In Dr. Hug-Hellmuth's work we have expert knowledge and understanding brought to bear, from the psycho-analytical standpoint, in masterly fashion on the problems she handles, and every page gives evidence of her deep comprehension of, and sympathy with, the child in all his varying desires and activities.
Dr. Hug-Hellmuth has divided her book into two parts—The Period of Infancy (Part I); Play-time (Play, speech, reasoning, the emotional life, etc.) (Part II); and these two parts together cover, as she tells us in her introduction (pp. xi and xii) the two first periods of childhood: the nursing period, 'principally occupied, so far as the mental processes are concerned, with reactions—pleasurable and painful—to the operations of feeding and the care of the body, and to the regularly recurring alternatives of sleep and waking, passes gradually over, during the later months of the first year, into the second great period', namely, the period of play. Of this the author writes: 'This period takes in the years during which play is for the child his chief interest and main purpose, and every object is made use of—a plaything. It includes the time from the end of the first year until the beginning of school life, that most important of landmarks in the child's existence'.
A third period, the period of serious study, is promised for treatment later on, in a special monograph, and with this we shall get the completion of the study of mental life in childhood, ranging from the very first stage, to what may be called the end of childhood and adolescence.
Perhaps for a majority of readers the greatest interest will centre upon the first period—the nursing period—(dealt with in pp. 1–37) since this stage of the child's development is so little known, so difficult and obscure to interpret, and so illuminatingly revealed by Dr. Hug-Hellmuth. All the chapters here are full of significance, but if any may be singled out, it would be perhaps chap. I, 'The functions of the senses i