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Published after fifteen years, this is manifestly a compilation of ill-assorted notes from a seminar on personality development given in 1935. Representing the work of twenty-four years with more than ten thousand children, this static, mechanistic presentation, without any understanding of motivation, is indeed disappointing. During the quarter century in which Dr. Plant worked as director of a juvenile clinic, tremendous contributions have been made in the field of child psychiatry; of these, there is practically no recognition.
The author's specialty is the current trend of inventing new names for familiar concepts. In addition, by taking these concepts out of context and depriving them of their dynamic meaning, he creates so much confusion that the reader is left bewildered. The title of the book is an example. According to the author, The Envelope is a membrane that lies 'between the need of the child and the sweep of social pressures'. One would expect that it corresponds to the 'stimulus barrier'. But this is not so. While it has only a 'cortical' function, it is also the interpreting agency and seems to have something to do with defenses. The author, however, does not discuss defense mechanisms at all, and the individual seems to be reduced by him to an envelope without any content.
The child is a neat little package of 'twenty-one problems' which the author enumerates in an equal number of chapters, for example: security, authority, cadence, adequacy, etc. This is really a superficial catalogue of phenomenological aspects of behavior with no consideration for the dynamics of personality development.
Regarding the sexual urge in children, Dr. Plant argues 'that if the sexual urge were as great a part of the dynamics of life as the psychoanalytic group would have us believe, we should see this mode of expression turned to far more often and we should have more evidence of direct sexual satisfaction arising from it'. Masturbation,