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This is a 'psychosomatic medicine monograph' written by a psycho-analyst, a psychiatrist and a psychiatric social worker. The study was carried on at the Long Island College Hospital in 1945–46, and initially included all primiparous patients admitted to the maternity service at that time; but data were sufficiently complete for only twenty-seven patients (64 per cent) of the group to be worthy of final correlative study.
To this reviewer it seems that the study is too general for the limited number of cases, which are obviously selected not by the authors but by the circumstances of clinic attendance and perhaps by the time (immediately on the close of the war).
There are some interesting, seemingly incidental observations, e.g. that all of the women who (consciously) strongly desired their babies wanted to nurse them, while the others predominantly did not wish to do so; that the two unmarried women who were most rejecting of their babies had compromised with the expectation of having girls, and were openly resentful of having boys. The authors believe that in the group in general preferential expectation regarding the sex of the child was not strong.