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The author, distinguished for her studies on the mental life of the child and the psychoanalysis of the child, records in this book her experience and theories—the result of more than ten years intensive work in this field. The presentation is not strictly systematic. The book is divided into two parts, the first part being devoted to the technique of child analysis and the author's findings, properly speaking, and the second to the more theoretical and general conclusions which apply to the entire development of the personality and the instinctual activities. The contents of many of the more important chapters have already been published in special articles or read at psychoanalytic congresses, and are therefore well known in analytic circles. Other chapters are completely new but join organically with the previously recorded experience and ideas of the author.
A critique of this extraordinarily full book is not easy. The chief difficulty is due to the peculiar heterogeneity of this exacting volume, which includes so many illuminating, even though often improbable, statements of great importance both theoretically and practically in this new and essentially unexplored field. Deeply penetrative descriptions of unconscious fantasies and emotions, which the author's remarkable intuitive capacity comprehended down to the finest details, are mingled with cumbersome and logically unsatisfying inferences and formulations. The book is very difficult to read and makes unusual demands of the reader. A vast amount of material is presented in so condensed a manner that direct observations are not always distinguished from interpretations or attempted reconstructions; or at any rate, the distinction is not clear to the reader. Even an experienced student of the fine points of deep psychology may be confused by the combination of interpretations and metapsychological (particularly, structural) explanations given. For example, the unconscious fantasy of introjecting the