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Dr. Charlotte Wolff has written yet another book on the hand, two chapters of which, in particular, will be of great interest to every psycho-analyst: 'The Hand and Intelligence' and 'The Hand and Temperament'. Her practical application, her method of hand interpretation, and her observations on mental defectives, mental illnesses, and the child, go somewhat outside our range of interest, but it is always worth while to compare means of objectively assessing facts and diagnoses as against our method of subjectively hearing them from our patients and forming our picture from the contradictions and omissions of the objective approach.
The growing interest in the study of the ego goes together with a growing interest in the human hand. Charlotte Wolff describes very impressively how the hand, in itself so ineffective in comparison with the animal's paw or claw, yet holds the whole range of mental potentiality by its co-operation with the mind, and becomes in this way the tool from which all mental and physical expression emanates. Hoffer has called the hand 'the servant of the ego': this book proves above all that this is so. We cannot, of course, expect that a book which is concerned essentially with practical issues should deal with an aspect in which we are becoming increasingly interested; that is, the evolutionary factor, what use a child makes of the hand in any phase of his early development, and how the hand is an indispensable vehicle in the forming of the child's earliest love relationships.