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Dr. Pearson has attempted the ambitious task of summarizing the literature of the last twenty-five years on child psychiatry and child analysis, and of illustrating it by a series of sixty-two case reports of the most varied kind. These reports cover almost every aspect of psychoanalytically oriented child psychiatry, and are often accompanied by a detailed account of the analytic structure of the case and of the treatment process. He has been amazingly successful
in the difficult task of condensation and selection. This book is in every way worthy of its two well-known and popular predecessors which he wrote with Dr. O. Spurgeon English, Emotional Problems of Living and Common Neuroses of Children and Adults. In many ways it is a supplement to the latter volume. Like the earlier books, it is written in an optimistic spirit regarding both prophylaxis and therapy. There is a similar optimism about psychoanalytic education. Though the author stresses common sense and the practical, he avoids no intricacy of theory or dynamics despite the fact that the book is largely intended for medical students and doctors outside the field of psychiatry and analysis. In the preface he discusses the didactic difficulties involved in presenting this varied mixture of cases, some simplified, some presented in great complexity, and gives cogent reasons for his choice of method.
In a book so encyclopedic in its scope, one can naturally find omissions. The reviewer was especially struck by the scant attention paid to learning difficulties, which loom so large among the problems of school children. In the more theoretical explanations of intrapsychic mechanisms, relatively little attention is devoted to problems of orality as compared to anal-sadistic factors. On occasion, terms are used in an unusual sense; for example, 'working through' is defined as the developmental process whereby the primacy of the genital zone is established, rather than in the sense that has become cur