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With one exception, this volume includes fourteen studies published during the past twelve years. While no formal attempt is made to integrate them, and at first glance they appear to be a collection of essays on diverse topics, this book does, nevertheless, present an interesting unity of emphasis. The final chapter, Some Factors Producing Different Types of Genital and Pregenital Organization, here published for the first time, might better have been placed at the beginning, for it gives unity and plan to much of the content of the other chapters.
In this chapter, the author discusses trauma and the evaluation of its effect upon the developing child. Severity and duration of the traumatic stimulus are important, but equally so is the child's capability to discharge the stimulus, and whether such discharge furthers or reverses libidinal development. An overwhelming stimulus may result for which the child is not yet properly equipped, with consequent setting up of a strain in the genital area through its premature erotization. It is suggested that masochism and bisexual identification may thus be enhanced. Many of the other chapters in the book investigate in specific areas the severe or overwhelming traumatic stimulus, its discharge, and its effect on development. The widely known papers on the Biological Economy of Birth and the Predisposition to Anxiety present the importance of the experience of birth from this point of view, as well as other correlations of personality development with observations of foetal and neonatal life. Many of these observations have never before been examined psychoanalytically, and these papers represent only a first step in their understanding. Passing beyond earliest childhood, two types of interference with adequate discharge may come into play: first, physical factors, as mechanical restraints or those consequent upon anatomical sexual differences; second, the difficulties engendered by parental attitudes.
In two papers on