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This book gives the most lucid and penetrating presentation so far of what psycho-analysis has taught us on the psychology of the human child. The importance of childhood has, of course, been recognized in analysis long ago and the reconstruction of childhood has always been central in our work. But the potentiality of the direct study of children was not fully realized in the beginning.
But now it has become obvious to many that one of the most important, and maybe the most important, aspect of psycho-analysis today is the study of developmental problems. This impression is confirmed by reading Anna Freud's book; which does not come as a surprise, since so much on which this estimate of the present state of analysis is based we owe to her work.
While the theoretical exposition of child development plays a dominant role in this work, it deals at the same time with a great number of interesting clinical and technical questions. The integration of these aspects shows the masterful unity of thought and presentation which we have come to expect of Anna Freud's writings. The same sense of balance and of continuity prevails in the skill, equalled only by a few, with which accepted and tested knowledge of earlier psychoanalysis is moulded into a unit together with many original contributions, which are the result of her own observations and her own thinking. The reader finds himself happily faced not by a more or less arbitrary selection of topics but, despite a considerable diversity of subject matter, by an inner unity, a whole, quite beyond and above the problems of formal structure and organization of the material which goes necessarily into the making of every book of this kind.
That analytic theory of development in this sense cannot be limited to pathology is evident. Freud has already often taken the step beyond pathological phenomena into normal mental life and said at the very beginning that a study of psychology and not only of psychopathology was his aim.