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This latest volume includes papers on child development presented at the meeting with Anna Freud at Stockbridge in 1950, a discussion
of masturbation at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1950 (including a translation of Tausk's paper of 1912), and fourteen other contributions concerning early childhood, latency and adolescence, among them a study of child-rearing some centuries ago. The papers here printed are without exception excellent and this series continues to be the only satisfactory survey of large areas of Child Psychiatry.
René Spitz offers a systematic classification of the psychogenic disorders of infancy based upon the maternal attitudes that engender them. This difficult type of study seems especially promising, and has been pioneered in by Dr. Spitz and by Miss Anna Freud who, with Sophie Dann in the present volume, contributes an investigation of a group of concentration camp children brought up without real or substitute parents. The children, whose early years were passed in an atmosphere somewhat comparable to Spitz's emotionally deprived infants, showed a strength of ego that is surprising when one considers the importance generally attached to the mother-child relationship early in life.
Bennett and Hellman compare the experiences of a child under close observation during its latency period with the material later derived from his analysis, an investigation rarely possible and of especial importance because of the light it sheds upon the ways of the unconscious in reworking the events of daily life. Selma Fraiberg presents a study of the sexual 'enlightenment' offered to a child and the child's understanding thereof. One wonders whether such enlightenment can be achieved by the methods commonly used. Martha Wolfenstein examines the mind of the child through analysis of his humor, managing incidentally to explain the puzzling fact that children often greatly enjoy jokes the points of which (as the adult understands them) they have en