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Mrs. Balint died in 1939 at the early age of forty-one. One could imagine no finer tribute to her memory than the publication of the English translation of this book, which first appeared in Hungarian some twenty-five years ago. Every page of it bears the stamp of its author's originality and brilliance. The freshness of its style, which is preserved in the excellent translation, the clarity and directness of the presentation, the wealth of apt illustrations, and the penetrating insight which it offers into the problems of child rearing all attest how great was the loss which psychoanalysis suffered by the author's untimely death.
The book is addressed to parents and others who are concerned with the education of children in the broadest sense of the word. In it the author attempts to accomplish two tasks: the one—a subsidiary one—is to present the facts which have been discovered by psychoanalysis concerning the mental life and development of the child from birth to the age of six or eight years; the other, which is the principal one, is to apply this knowledge to the problems of child rearing.
It is noteworthy that even twenty-five years ago the author saw clearly that the proper aim of child rearing is to afford a maximum of constructive help to the child in the difficult but necessary task of achieving the degree of instinct mastery required of it by its environment by discipline, while at the same time permitting its instinctual life as much satisfaction as is appropriate within these limits. The author makes the point very clearly that excessive indulgence or permissiveness can be as harmful to a child as excessive frustration, something that was by no means as well known among some analysts a generation ago as it is today.
In general the author's approach to her main task is an admirably scientific one. She makes no attempt to minimize the difficulty of steering a safe course between the Scylla of overindulgence and the