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Willi Hoffer's psychoanalytic career has its origins in the psychological study of children and this interest persisted throughout and was coextensive with his general psychoanalytic career. Hoffer's contributions span two phases in the history of psychoanalytic child psychology located by Ernst Kris around a chronological dividing line in the early 1920's. Early Development and Education of the Child is a tribute to Willi Hoffer and his scientific work in both phases of the psychoanalytic study of child development. The focus in the first phase was on the typical conflicts and danger situations and their relation to the maturational sequence of libidinal development. The second phase was a response to the development of ego psychology and it is characterized by the effort to integrate a wider set of factors in the psychoanalytic account of personality development.
Part I of the volume consists of papers written between 1949 and 1966, an era in psychoanalysis when analysts were responding to exhortations for the more complete study of the full scope of ego ontogenesis. In 1945 Hartmann and Kris had looked back over progress in the theory of ego development during the previous two decades and concluded that genetic propositions about ego development were still incomplete and unsatisfactory. Freud's fundamental developmental propositions implied by and dispersed within his discussions of the various metapsychological perspectives had led to more knowledge about the development of the libido and superego than about the ego. They encouraged a widening of the data base. Retrospective methods within the analytic setting could not reconstruct the interplay of maturational and environmental factors which co-determine the development of those ego functions needed to synthesize tensions and reduce conflict and anxiety. In 1945 Hartmann and Kris recommended the constant integration of two observational methods, psychoanalysis and direct observation techniques, in order