Problems of Infancy and Childhood. Transactions of the Third Conference, March 7-8, 1949. New York, N. Y.: Edited by Milton J. E. Senn, M.D. New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1949. 156 pp.

This booklet publishes a continuation of the efforts of investigators in pediatrics, obstetrics, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and other fields

of child care, to integrate their disciplines through conferences about their research, concepts and plans with the aim of reaching some solutions to the problems of the mother-child relationship in the postnatal period. The transactions of the second of these conferences, reviewed in this QUARTERLY,1 dealt with the prenatal period.

The subjects discussed are Anxiety of Mothers (as verbalized to physicians); the Psychological Situation of Mother and Child (on return from the hospital); the Emotional Reactions of Children to Tonsillectomy and Adenoidectomy.

The problems presented by mothers to their pediatricians range from existing psychopathology in the child, through doubt and anxiety caused by conflict between prevalent cultural patterns and specific medical practice, to problems arising from maternal psychopathology.

Psychoanalytic understanding of the dynamic factors in the mother's personality which determine her relationship to the child, is the basis of the conference approach. Important throughout the discussion is the stress laid on the pressing problem of how to change present-day infant care practices among physicians and hospitals toward an orientation to the psychological situation of mother and child upon which depends the physical and emotional health of both. Two social changes are suggested: first, in respect to methods of teaching pediatrics in the medical schools, so as to indoctrinate a new generation of doctors and pediatricians in mental health concepts of judging behavior and relationships; second, to change and educate mental health ideas in communities, so that women and especially adolescents will assimilate them.

The discussion of maternal anxiety brings out the roles played in it by such factors as the inexperience of the primaparae, the numerous demands of family life made