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The picture presented in this book of the mental life of the child resembles nothing so much as the isolated spiders' webs which hang upon a hedge on an autumn day. The child's complexes' are classified in a long series of isolated items, the Oedipus complex (of course), the mutilation complex, the Cain complex, the destructive complex, the spectacular complex, the Diana complex, the flight complex, and so on. These are grouped as 'complexes of the object', 'of the ego' and 'of attitude'. Eventually we do come to the problem of 'points of intersection of the various complexes', the spiders' webs being thus allowed to meet and touch and even cross each other. But we are given no notion of how they come to hang upon the hedge. We are no wiser at the end of the book than at the beginning as to how they grow and what their developmental meaning is. The problem of anxiety is nowhere dealt with. It may be that the 'child mind' itself is thought of as the spider which spins the webs, for the author states the psychological problem thus: 'How do the vital mechanisms of the instinctive and affective life … present themselves to the child mind? How does it react to such phenomena as repression,