The Childhood Emotional Pattern: The Key to Personality, Its Disorders and Therapy: Leon J. Saul,  Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, New York, 1977.

Saul has written an enjoyable, short, useful hybrid of a book. It is both a plug for the necessity and usefulness of psychodynamic psychotherapy and a criticism of its ofttimes inept application and narrow focus. It is a criticism of the narrowness caused by our psychoanalytic heritage and an endorsement of the firm foundation that heritage provides us.

Addressing primarily analytic psychotherapists, Saul hopes to be of value to others also, particularly pediatricians, in their attempts at “preventing emotional ills.” He wishes to contribute a more scientific base to the art of understanding the human personality. He asserts that his formulations “deal with traumatic influences during childhood that cause lasting results in emotional disorders for life, (and that) these are universal the world over …” (p. XIII). Although Saul's long experience is stated to be mostly with middle-class patients, I believe that to those of us who work in the public sector, his patients would appear to be more upper-middle class. While we analysts may believe and may find solace in our testimonial assertions that the dynamics we describe are universal, we must be ready to answer the criticisms and non-belief that these declarations always stimulate from nonanalysts. Furthermore, nonanalysts seldom reasonably use the dynamics they may discern when they do believe them.

Saul also states that he desires to have his points accepted only when they are proven by observable facts. For this purpose a large portion of the book consists of near verbatim clinical reports of therapist/patient interactions, allowing the reader to draw his own, but hopefully similar, conclusions. As he points out, this is a departure from what is customary in psychoanalytic writings where authoritative essays are the general rule.

But, consistent with the usual form of psychoanalytic writing, Saul reviews Freud and, like for Columbus, gives him due credit while pointing out that it is both acceptable and reasonable to g