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The psychoanalytic study of the child, which appears yearly, has established itself as a forum for the discussion of developments in ego psychology initiated by Anna Freud in this country and Heinz Hartmann in the United States. The idea behind their work is that psychoanalysts should occupy themselves just as much with the surface as the depths of the mental apparatus and, as a number of papers breaking new ground have appeared at
regular intervals in this series, I approached the twenty-fourth volume with high expectations.
There is the usual good scholarly standard and clear exposition in the twenty papers which are grouped under four headings: ‘Contributions to psychoanalytic theory’, ‘Aspects of normal and pathological development’, ‘Clinical contributions’ and ‘Applications of psychoanalysis’. The headings show the wide range of subject matter which none the less tends to focus on early states of the ego: papers on the development of object constancy and primal repression appear in the first theoretical part followed, in the second, by others on infantile omnipotence, the transitional object and an informative review of work on ‘The imaginary companion’ by Humberto Nagera; the third section contains a paper on border-line states in childhood and two on drug taking in adolescence. Another collateral theme is creativity and, to contrast it, is a lively article in the fourth part on ‘The function of criminal law in riot control’.
For my part, ‘Loss, rage and repetition’ by Martha Wolfenstein was the most stimulating. Her study of adults, children and adolescents who lose their parents, shows that the death of a parent in childhood is followed by rage optimally leading to displacement of the parent imago onto another person who was loved before the loss: she describes how a grandmother admirably managed to help her grandson to do this.
In her discussion she arrives at the challenging proposition that the prolonged period of mourning, characteristic of adults, is no