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This study is based on a great number of painstaking observations in nursery schools. For an entire school year one hundred fifty children (twenty of them for a second year) were observed daily. Their use of paints, crayons, clay and blocks, and their general behavior were recorded in minute detail by special observers. Such a study should be valuable in heightening the sensitivity of teachers and child psychologists to the content and value of children's spontaneous paintings.
It was found that painting helped many of the children to talk about their personal problems. The apparently least realistic element in a child's painting is often the one about which it feels most deeply. The birth of a baby in the family, besides raising the issue of rivalry, is likely to renew old sexual conflicts. As paintings reflect primarily feelings and only secondarily the child's overt behavior, the mood of a child's painting may be in sharp contrast to its overt behavior. There are also oversimplifications, as for instance in the statement that 'each child in its paintings and drawings accentuates those parts of its body which it has experienced most keenly'.
The authors work with limited psychoanalytic concepts. They recognize that anal interests and anal conflicts are reflected in the choice of colors and painting techniques, yet they 'wonder whether decorative effects might be another sublimated form of the desire to smear and soil'.
The second volume of biographical summaries of the children is a disappointment. A number of the biographies does not even mention the child's father. The sibling constellation (sex, ordinal