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In another of the important series of publications issuing from the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic, this volume is a compilation of papers published over a period of approximately 40 years. In this collated form they constitute a body of extremely interesting information on psychoanalytic studies of the child-mother relationship. The author, in an extended period of collaboration with Anna Freud and others, as well as in independent work, has long established her reputation for incisive observation and critical evaluation.
The book is about the relation of the developing infant and child to its mother, and the importance of this relationship for ultimate personality structure. A large number of approaches to the study of this interaction are employed. Of course, the play of children is carefully scrutinized throughout the book. “A child at play reacts as he does in real life, experiencing all his passions, his satisfactions, his disappointments, and his conflicts… It is this very confusion between fantasy and reality, play and life situations, which turns every observation of this kind into a useful piece of material for analytic investigation” (p. 32). While this is nothing new to the psychoanalyst, it is rewarding to observe the author's investigation of child play over a great many years, and its application for therapeutic purposes.
Another significant contribution is her differentiating the urge to tell “as a means of attracting, winning, and seducing a partner,” from the compulsion to confess which “derives from the pressure of guilt feelings and the need for punishment” (p. 51). She shows that “empathy between infant and mother can be based on an early phase of acute and lively observations, perceptions, and receptivity in the infant and child” (p. 70). She deals with many of the problems of child analysis which are occasioned by the need to consider the mother's influence on the treatment. She ranges far and wide in her observations, always bearing in mind the