“Beyond the Infantile Neurosis” Collected Essays Sara Rosenfeld London;  Sara Rosenfeld Research Fund, Hampstead Clinic, £2.50

It was predictably a good, moving, learning experience, to read through Sara Rosenfeld's essays: writing which spreads over almost twenty years. This permits us to follow the main trends of Sara Rosenfeld's thinking and clinical work. We knew from the title of her essays, from Anna Freud's foreword, and from working with her in The Hampstead Clinic, that her interest and writing was centred on the “atypical” or “borderline” child's life and development. This interest started in the early fifties, when comparatively little was discussed and written about this “dark area” of childhood disturbances. It was about this time that she gathered around herself, in The Hampstead Clinic, interested child therapists and founded the Borderline Research Group. She stimulated and co-ordinated our thinking and clinical work with these “puzzling” children. The two papers which emerged from the seventeen years work in the Group were written together with the Borderline Group's secretary, Marjorie Sprince, and appeared in the Psychoanalytic Study of The Child. They are well known and often quoted, even in recent literature dealing with borderline pathology, though both papers were written in the Sixties. Sara Rosenfeld's ability to draw together, synthesise and express clearly her own and other people's findings and experiences is well reflected in these two papers. The first, “An attempt to formulate the meaning of the concept of Borderline” was an effort to define the common dynamics of these children, each of them presenting so differently from the others. The second deals mainly with the clinical and technical aspects of the treatment of the borderline child.

Reading through all the papers it struck me that it was somewhat one-sided to see Sara Rosenfeld as interested only in the atypical child, and more true to view the focal point of her interest as early development. She sought continually to evaluate and differentiate constitutional givens from early internalisations of traumat