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In this book Dorothy Baruch has presented as fiction the treatment of a seven-year-old boy and his parents. The author has charmingly portrayed the techniques employed in psychotherapy with children, for which the lay reader has little understanding when it is presented in a scientific form. This is indeed a service to a public surfeited with psychiatric trash and sensationalism. It presents a sincere picture of what goes on in the therapist's office in the treatment of a child.
The author evinces a fine understanding of the patient's needs, and well presents to the reader some of the basic psychoanalytic phenomena as they appear clinically in treatment: sibling rivalry, the Oedipal conflict, the child's fantasies about pregnancy, and its deeply repressed aggression.
The child came for treatment mainly because of difficulties in learning. He was an apathetic, passive boy, with an average intelligence. At the end of treatment his I.Q. was 140 and his school functioning was excellent. The role of the emotions in intellectual functioning as well as in the boy's asthma for which medical treatment had given him little relief is convincingly demonstrated.
The author includes the parents in therapy by the one therapist working with all members of the family. In this way is shown convincingly the interaction of the mother's feelings as they subtly and imperceptibly affect the child's behavior.
Since this book is written primarily for the lay public and not as a scientific presentation, this reviewer does not take issue with the author's therapeutic approach nor with the viewpoints of the dynamics of the child's psychosomatic condition. The auxiliary characters are dramatized and glamorized, and the case is shorn of those elements to which the public would have resistance.