Preface to Renata Gaddini's Italian Translation of The Family and Individual Development1

A preface is perhaps needed to enable these papers and the point of view they represent to relate to the country of the language into which they are being translated. Translation is not simply a matter of finding Italian words for English words. It has to do with the transferring of ideas from one culture to another.

Superimposed on these inherent difficulties is a special one in the case of a book like this, because the subject is not clearly related to medical education. The teaching of medical students and postgraduate doctors has a certain amount of uniformity in regard to the basic sciences of anatomy and physiology and in regard to the physical diseases and their treatment. There is no such uniformity in the teaching of the other aspect of paediatrics, that which has to do with the disorders of emotional development, distortions of the personality and character, and abnormalities in the field of behaviour.

The main reason for this discrepancy is that the science that underlies this latter aspect of paediatrics (the science that corresponds to anatomy and physiology in physical medicine) has not yet attained firm roots. One may ask in fact whether this science has yet been named, because certainly the name psychology does not meet the situation. In order to begin to state the nature of the background science for child psychiatry one has to use a phrase such as: ‘the emotional development of the individual in the given setting’. The word psychology has been taken over by those who have an academic approach closely related to education. Sometimes the term ‘dynamic psychology’ is used in an attempt to get back from academic psychology to a theory of the emotional life and of its evolution in the individual and in the individual's growing relationship to the family and to society.

If there is no name for this basic science it can be certain that there is also no text-book, because a generally acceptable text-book depends for its existence on a generally accepted basis