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Dr. Griffiths has studied the imaginative reactions of fifty five-year-old
children, thirty of whom were drawn from a London elementary school, and twenty from a school in Brisbane. The conditions of experiment were as follows: Each child came singly for the interview, while Dr. Griffiths sat writing notes of her observations. The child talked until conversation flagged, then he was asked to draw something, to describe what he had drawn, to tell a story, to recount a dream and to comment on three different ink blots. Twenty interviews of about forty minutes' duration were given to each child, the observer made no interpretation and throughout the experiment she sought to maintain a passive attitude.
The wide range of fantasy which she elicited by this technique is set down with admirable clearness, and the value of the record is enhanced because it is presented without interpretation (Chapters III.–VI.). The reader is thus allowed to appreciate the nature of the child's world and manner of thinking without having his intellect stimulated and his prejudices aroused by the vexed question: 'What do these fantasies mean?'
In the second part of her book Dr. Griffiths weighs her fantastic material carefully and comes to temperate conclusions. She lays stress on the interrelation of fantasy and environment, pointing out how a free environment enriches the content of thought, and she values the child's experiments in fantasy as an essential means of solving all emotional problems.
Incidentally she records several interesting series of stories which were told by the children on consecutive days, each fantasy being an attempt to deal in a different way with a single anxiety situation (viz. Dick's series of fantasies on acquiring desired objects, Hilda's on the repair of damaged objects, p. 178). Believing in the benefits of a free expression of fantasy without accompanying interpretation, Dr. Griffiths gives practical and well considered advice in her chapter on 'Phant