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Teachers of workers training for the child guidance or child psychiatric setting, of whatever discipline, need a basic text on the methods of the child psychotherapist. In many ways this book goes towards filling this gap, and it is as a presentation to the other workers of the team that this review is addressed. That is not to say that the book is not of great interest to the members of the profession of child psychotherapy, for there is much in it to read and consider. But it addresses itself to a wider field, including perhaps the general reader, and it should be judged from the wider point of view.
Firstly it must be said that although the book jacket points out that the authors whom the editors have called upon are drawn from both the Tavistock Clinic and the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, the overall emphasis of the book is in the direction of the former. Furthermore, the relative under-representation of the orientation of the Hampstead Clinic means that the contribution of American Child Analysis towards child psychotherapy is scarcely mentioned. In particular the contributions of Eric Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim and Peter Blos, for example, go unmentioned, whilst Margaret Mahler's work on child development and child psychosis is poorly described. It is striking also that Donald Winnicott, although referred to, is not expounded upon.
This, then, is an account of child psychotherapy, its techniques, settings and theories, from the battle front, the workers in the field applying psychoanalysis to the problems coming to the clinics. The greatest strengths are the many excellent accounts of actual therapies with children and of the different settings in which the children are seen. Moreover the cases whose treatment is described are largely rather disturbed children. Of course this is to be expected in Francis Tustin's characteristic chapter on the work she has so courageously pursued with psychotic children, but the children's groups in primary schools d