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This book is a collection of Willi Hoffer's papers and is divided into two parts: the first is entitled 'Psychoanalysis and Early Development' and the second 'Psychoanalysis and the Education of the Child'. In terms of the chronology of Willi Hoffer's life the two are back to front, as Part II consists of those papers arising from his experience in Vienna firstly in 'Jerubbaal', Siegfried Bernfeld's experiment in the Baumgarten Children's Home, and secondly as a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society applying his newly-gained understanding to children's education. This covers a period of his life therefore from 1919 to 1946, i.e. from the time he went as a young veteran of the first world war (and would-be veterinary surgeon) to work in the Baumgarten Children's Home, to his immigration into Britain as a colleague of Anna Freud and future President of the British Psychoanalytical Society (1959–62). The papers forming the chapters of Part I were produced between 1949 and 1966. They were stimulated by his own filmed observations of infants in the Hampstead War Nurseries and his preoccupations with the psychoanalytic theories of early development in which, initially at least, he was most influenced by Anna Freud herself and the work of Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein. I think it is the latter collection of papers forming the first seven chapters of the book which would be of the greatest interest to the psychoanalyst with a particular interest in child development.
The direction of Hoffer's life was changed by his involvement with Bernfeld's social experiment in a Jewish children's home along what we would now call 'Therapeutic Community' lines. It formed, according to Hoffer, a 'blueprint for Kibbutz-education' for 'a tiny section of immigrants in Palestine' shortly after the First World War. A restrospective account of this written in 1965 forms chapter nine of the book and makes a fascinating story of this early adventure which has features familiar to a