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In 1947 the late Kate Friedlander published her Psychoanalytical
Approach to Juvenile Delinquency, a book that is still the best study of the differences between neurotic and antisocial children. In the present volume, Ivy Bennett, a British lay analyst, reports her verification of most of Friedlander's hypotheses by exhaustive study of fifty delinquent and fifty neurotic child patients at a rural child guidance service in England.
Bennett offers an excellent historical review of the study of delinquency (unfortunately both this review and the extensive bibliography contain no references later than 1953), and proceeds to a valuable discussion of her method of research and diagnostic system. The latter half of the book is devoted to case histories of all the children. These are vivid and interesting, yet it is hard to see how their value to the reader can justify the space devoted to them. The real contribution of the book, however, is its thorough and mathematically reliable statistical study of all sorts of facts about delinquency and neurosis. The statistics are unobtrusive, not obscuring or breaking up the text (as such tables so often do). They are clearly summarized and evaluated by the author, who proposes hypotheses to be tested (for example, that more neurotic than delinquent children show isolated impairments in ability to learn particular subjects in school) and reports their validity (this hypothesis was confirmed).
The results of the study are not in general surprising, for they confirm most of the ideas proposed by Aichhorn, Friedlander, and others; but this confirmation is needed. We learn, for example, that interruptions in the relation of either parent and child are more productive of delinquent than of neurotic behavior; that inconsistency of discipline tends to produce delinquency; that foster homes are enormously more productive of delinquency than of neurosis. One gets the impression that the neurotic child is likely to have suffered a mo