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For about a decade, Anna Freud has collaborated regularly with Joseph Goldstein, named Professor of Law, and his colleagues at Yale University, in a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of psychoanalysis and law. Two massive tomes (Goldstein & Katz, 1965); (Katz et al., 1967) in which Anna Freud collaborated, have already borne witness to the fruitfulness of the Yale-Hampstead team. The latest product from this source is of a different category. It is a small book (of 161 pages) with a new collaborator in Professor Albert J. Solnit, head of the Yale Child-Study Centre; and while it is addressed to lawyers, it is also directed towards (and has already achieved) a much wider readership among social workers, teachers, doctors and members of all those disciplines which are concerned, one way or another, with children in need of placement for any reason. It is a beautifully and elegantly written important book.
Beyond the Best Interests of the Child has an enchanting preface by Dorothy Burlingham. The book's first section, 'The Problem and our Premises', puts Child Placement in Perspective, and discusses The Child–Present Relationships, putting emphasis on the 'psychological' relationship in all its aspects, whether in the biological, or in all other situations where this relationship occurs. Not that children do not need physical care, but the law caters to these needs already. The authors also state their value preferences here: of giving the child needs precedence over those of adults; and for privacy, i.e. for the law to interfere with personal relationships as little as possible. The new concept (to be described briefly below), of 'Common-Law Adoptive Parent–Child Relationship', is mooted. Part 2 gives 'Guidelines and their Implications for the Laws of Child Placement'. Part 3 applies the guidelines to an actual American case. A Model Child-Placement State is offered. The authors finally 'Examine their Premises' as to why the Child's Interests should, in