General: Gregory Stragnell. Psychopathological Disturbances from the Avoidance of Parental Responsibility. New York Medical Journal and Medical Record. September 6, 1922.

In psycho-analytic work up to the present considerably more attention has been paid to the filio-parental relationship from the point of view of the children than from that of the parents. Such an article as this is therefore welcome, although it admittedly deals only with one factor in the complex conditions that determine the attitude of parents towards their children. The author takes his text from four recent plays—Sir James Barrie's Mary Rose, Clemence Dane's Bill of Divorcement, Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie and Franz Molnar's Liliom. In all of these plays a parent shirks the responsibilities of his or her parenthood by disappearing in one way or another during the whole period of the child's growth. In searching for the motives underlying behaviour of this kind, Dr. Stragnell finds, in addition to the obvious desire to escape from the lengthy and complicated burdens incidental to human parenthood, a number of important factors connected with the parent's unconscious process of 'identification' of himself with his child. Thus on the one hand the parent, in virtue of this identification, 'endeavours to live again those days of childhood unmarred by care and responsibility'. But on the other hand 'the process of identification brings with it not only the joys of childhood but also its trials and pains, those connected with the unaided struggle with sex and all manner of tabooed topics being the most difficult to manage. … Those