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The present status of psychology gives us the right to expect, from a text which aims 'to synthesize current scientific discovery in terms of the phenomena of childhood', more than the fare offered here. Guided by the Gestalt school of psychology and the studies of Dr. Arnold Gesell in the behaviour of infancy, the author colours the principles of configuration and maturation with her own attitude toward the organismic theory. This prepossession cannot excuse in a scientist complete omission of what Freud's 'Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex' has to offer a psychologist of any school. Thus there is in the psychological part of this book, no sense of the 'whole child' at which the author aims, because there is no understanding of the dynamics and causation of behaviour in the child of different levels. The instinctual basis of behaviour finds no place to explain play phenomena, language learning, curiosity, and other phases and problems of childhood. Recommending among many wise pedagogical principles, that the child should be told 'just what he wants to know', the author fails to understand the unconscious import of the child's 'why's', and though advising frankness, she slides right past his questions on the new baby. As there is no adequate understanding of the basic problem of anxiety, the passage on fears is linked with a discussion of the possibilities of actual accidents. This confusion is traceable to the author's total shyness of depth psychology.
Despite much liberal pedagogy of which one approves and which must be stimulating still to a vast audience, the 200 pages of psychology is not modern.