Psychiatric Interviews with Children: Edited by Helen Leland Witmer. New York: The Commonwealth Fund, 1946. 443 pp.

This book was commissioned by the Commonwealth Fund as an aid in the training of child psychiatrists. But it is addressed not only to students and beginners in child psychotherapy, but also to experienced therapists, as a means of presenting variations in their work. Still another purpose is to stimulate evaluative thinking of theory and methods in this relatively new field. It is gratifying to report that the book succeeds admirably in all three respects.

The volume consists of ten case records by eight psychotherapists and their psychiatric case workers, with a brief discussion of the rationale of diagnosis and treatment by each therapist. This is further elaborated by the editor. The discussion is limited to psychotherapy in child guidance clinics, staffed by the traditional team of psychotherapist, psychologist, and psychiatric case worker. Work with the child by the therapist proceeds simultaneously and invariably with work with the mother by the case worker, because the underlying therapeutic assumption is that a child 'can rarely be helped unless the parents achieve a new orientation toward him'.

Both theory and practice are eclectic, showing the influence of such teachers as Freud, Anna Freud, Adolf Meyer, David Levy, Frederick Allen and others. Of the eight collaborating therapists, five are physicians, two are doctors of philosophy in psychology or education, one 'is a widely recognized child analyst', and six have been psychoanalyzed. But the quality of their work varies more with their talents than with either their training or experience. It reaches an inspiring high in the treatment of a nine-year-old stutterer by Dr. Phyllis Blanchard, and a discouraging low in the treatment of a very neurotic nine-year-old girl, in which the whole gamut of therapeutic blunders is committed, from interviewing the mother in the presence of the child, to raising the threat of racial discrimination.