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Volumes XVII and XVIII of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child offer forty-three papers on subjects collected under the headings of contributions to psychoanalytic theory, to normal and pathological child development, to clinical and applied psychoanalysis. The policy of publishing clinical and theoretical material from both child and adult analyses and from practice and research has proved a fruitful one. Psychoanalysis is essentially a genetic developmental psychology. Any psychoanalyst may find the data and implications of psychoanalytic treatment and research studies of children valuable to his understanding of normality and of psychopathology; this annual demonstrates the reciprocal contributions which general theory building and adult psychoanalyses make to the continuing refinement of our knowledge of children as well as of adults. Helene Deutsch has spoken recently of the warm interest all analysts felt in the early child work in Vienna; this annual has played an important role in closing the gap built up in the intervening years between child analysis and adult analysis.
A reviewer confronted with eleven hundred odd pages from two volumes of an annual holding a unique position in psychoanalytic literature will vary his comments according to his impression of those papers he believes of general interest to psychoanalysts and of others which hold a particular significance for him. While each of these forty-three papers is worthy of perusal, they vary in intent, format, and range.
The theoretical papers of Volume XVII reflect the current interest in superego concepts, four of six in the section concerning this topic. Hartmann and Loewenstein in Notes on the Superego recognize this trend and place their formulations regarding superego and ego ideal within the context of the more differentiated knowledge of the development and functions of the ego available to us today. They disagree with the tendency to ascribe to the superego all that opposes the child's