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This is one of the most important books on child psychology published in the English language in recent years. It offers no new facts, but it
gathers together all the more significant descriptive data of infant behaviour in the first year of life, as given to us by the familiar names of Preyer, Sully, Shinn, Darwin, Tracy, Baldwin, Stern, Claparède, Koffka, Bühler, and the more recent Continental observers, and builds them into a coherent whole on the basis of psycho-analytical theory. It thus compels the attention of both groups, the academic child psychologists and the working psycho-analyst. For the former, new significance is given to the familiar facts of infant history. The psychologists' store of descriptive data ceases to be a mere lucky-bag of disparate items, and falls into true growth patterns of psychological structure. And for the latter, the theoretical outcome of psycho-analytic work with adults and children is tested against the earliest observable facts of actual behaviour.
The date of original publication of the book (1925) precludes the more recent landmarks in theory, such as Hemmung, Symptom und Angst. The author refers to Rank's work on the trauma of birth, in order to reject the specific elements in Rank's views. In his discussion of instincts, Bernfeld deliberately sets on one side the grouping offered in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, since 'the life- and death-instincts are biological forces, they are beyond the conception of the individual'; and 'for understanding the child, it is more important to separate these two groups [i.e. the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts] than to relate them'. With this, of course, most working students of the concrete psychological history of the individual would still agree.
Bernfeld makes a detailed and acute analysis in relation to the Freudian theory of instincts, of the observable different movement-impulses of the new-born, of the various phases of development between birth and weaning of th