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From an article published in Samiksa (Vol. VI, No. 3, 1953), Dr. Glover has developed this lucid, thoughtful, and concise outline of theoretical and clinical applications of psychoanalysis to child psychiatry. He declares that 'despite the failures of its frontal attack on general psychiatry, psychoanalysis executed an outflanking movement and ended by capturing the field of child psychiatry'. To keep to the military metaphor, Dr. Glover uses this conquered territory as a base for the subsequent operation, the effort to use analytic principles for the diagnosis, classification, and treatment of emotional disturbances of childhood and for the even greater task of validating the genetic reconstructions and hypotheses of psychoanalysis.
He begins with a description of what he has termed Freud's 'master concept of the mental apparatus', to which, he says, any subsequent description of later developmental stages must conform. He lists three groups of factors—dominant instincts, dominant mechanisms, and structural differentiation—which he feels must be correlated clinically and theoretically for specific ages. The importance of constitutional factors during the first two and one half years of life is stressed. He suggests that 'functional disorders' are essentially disorders of excitation and discharge, and he differentiates them from more 'canalized' forms of psychosomatic disorders. The classification then proposed divides psychiatric disorders of childhood into 1, functional and psychosomatic, and 2, symptom formations, which include neuroses and prepsychotic and psychotic states. The criteria for diagnosis and differential diagnosis are discussed in greater detail than are the indications for and technical aspects of treatment.
This is a most valuable contribution to a much needed correlation and integration of the clinical findings and theoretical principles of psychoanalysis, child development, and child psychiatry, and to a psychoanalytic nosology for psychiat