“So the Witch Won't Eat me”: Fantasy and the Child's Fear of Infanticide. By Dorothy Bloch, Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978,  246 pp.

This is a tightly organized, sensitively written, and clearly reasoned book based on a quarter century of psychoanalytic practice with patients ranging in age from two and a half to sixty-eight. In reviewing the development of the work and identifying its scope and purpose, the author states:

When I initially decided to write this book, I thought of it as a book about children I had analyzed. As I examined my treatment of one child after another, however, I soon realized that I was actually writing about fantasy. Once I began to probe the function of children's fantasies, it became apparent that they were a means of survival and defended the children against their fear of infanticide. It was when I recognized that my discussion would have to include the fantasy in homosexuality that I began to understand and became interested in investigating the relationship between the defensive fantasies of children and of adults.

That what emerged is a single theme with variations has been as much of a surprise to me as it may be to the reader. The discovery that the fear of infanticide may be dominant in early childhood and may remain constant throughout life, although on a diminished and unconscious plane, … took many years and exposure to many patients before it became what I now consider it: a fact. That there is also a continuity between the defensive fantasies of children and of adults follows automatically from their function as a defense against that fear.

I have divided this book into two sections, “Childhood” and “The Later Years.” In each chapter I have dealt with a different aspect of fantasy and the specific fear that required it, and have illustrated it with the case that in many instances taught me the

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most about it. I hope that an understanding of children's preoccupations and the meaning of their communications may improve the relationship between children and their parents and enable those children, when they become parents, to function more happily. I also hope