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'Early in life', says Lawrence Frank, in his foreword to these two volumes, 'children realize that it is not wise or safe to reveal what they think, how they feel, their wishes and daydreams, their sometimes disturbing fantasies.' This leads in time to a hidden preconscious and an unknown unconscious world of thought which can eventually be disclosed to the outside observer only through the means of special techniques. Those who study the child or treat him are preoccupied with this problem of getting across to such inaccessible regions of his mind. Child analysts have evolved a special play technique to do so, psychologists projective techniques, and Piaget has used a special method of clinical interrogation to reach the preconscious ideation of children. All have found that the indirect way in, the longest way round, is the shortest way in.
In these two volumes the author is very much concerned with eliciting the child's personal view of the world. This is the view that Piaget has been investigating over the past thirty years, and so it is rather surprising that the author finds no place for him either in her pages or in her index. This omission may be due to the fact that her intention is less to give the child's personal view of the world than to record a description and analysis of his personality development. Piaget has never shown any interest in the personality of his young subjects. Mrs. Murphy's effort, therefore, is to see the child concretely and eclectically and to understand what he is experiencing and what his behaviour means to him as well as to other children and adults. She has turned for operational concepts to the Rorschach scheme of personality structure, to psycho-analytic concepts of needs and drives, to Erikson's mode and zone dynamics, and to the Gestalt concepts of field