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By Anna Freud (New York: Int. Univ. Press, 1965; London: Hogarth 1966. Pp. 272+xii. $5.00. 35s.)
The Family and Individual Development. By D. W. Winnicott (London: Tavistock; New York: Basic Books, 1965. Pp. 181+viii. $5.00. 30s.)
A specialist in another field approaches such works as these with a tremendous sense of humility, a humility which hopefully will match the diffidence with which these two masters of the study of children assess their own contributions to the facilitation of normal development and provision for the results of pathology, both in the individual child and in the family within which the pathology develops.
Miss Freud's formulations have been such an integral part of my own thinking for so many years that I find in this book a vivid illustration of her theoretical path since she presented a "picture of childhood" as seen by a psycho-analyst in the first Handbook of Child Psychology,1 through The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence2 which reached me in the midst of my field work in Bali and helped to organize my comparative observations on character formation in different cultures, to the inclusive sweep of the present work. I am of course only competent to deal with these subject matters within this general cross-cultural context, seeing them both as a general frame-work for thinking about human development in all cultures, and as the outgrowth of the special discipline of psycho-analysis within our own historical tradition.
These two books, each written out of serenity and many years of experience with the problems of infancy and childhood within psycho-analytic theory, complement each other in many ways. Dr Winnicott begins where Miss Freud ends, in that he takes the whole framework which she presents in such clear outline for granted, and devotes himself to the dimensions of maturation, the child's urge to grow, and the maternal environment within which that growth normally takes place, or the therapeutic environment, supportive or di