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Speaking some years ago at a Symposium of the Psychiatric Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, I ventured to predict that the future of psychiatric diagnosis, prognosis and treatment was bound up with the future of child-analysis. Considering the backward state of psychiatric science at that time, this view was comparatively easy to maintain and document. But now that Melanie Klein has brought her researches up to date, and has published them in one comprehensive volume, the more difficult task faces the reviewer of estimating the importance of her findings for the future of psycho-analysis itself. And I have no hesitation in stating that in two main respects her book is of fundamental importance for the future of psycho-analysis. It contains not only unique clinical material gathered from first-hand analytic observation of children, but lays down certain conclusions which are bound to influence both the theory and practice of analysis for some time to come. So much may certainly be said at a first reading, that even if her views arouse—as they undoubtedly will—a varying degree of dissent in analytical circles the discussion which is bound to follow publication of her book will help to bring out many divergences in analytic tendency which so far have been obscured by a too ready glossing over of difficult passages in standard theory. And this itself is no mean contribution to psycho-analytical science.
Although it is not possible to give a full summary of the author's copious contributions, some outline of the more important points is essential to an adequate review. Fortunately this is not a difficult task. The greater part of the book is an expansion of two courses of lectures given at different dates (a fact which accounts in part for a somewhat excessive amount of overlapping in exposition). But it contains also one or two chapters (in particular Chapters VIII and IX), based on earlier papers on the subject. These two chapters give the gist of Mela