Introduction to Developmental Psychiatry: By Beulah C. Bosselman, Ira M. Rosenthal and Marvin Schwarz. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C Thomas, Publisher, 1965. 139 pp.

Psychoanalytic insights concerning the influence of early traumata upon the development of neuroses have had more influence on educators than on physicians. Medical education lays emphasis on pathology and does not equip the young physician with insights and techniques that enable him to practice preventive psychiatry.

In teaching general practitioners and pediatricians I found them especially interested in psychiatric syndromes and less concerned with the management of developmental crises. Yet my experience as analyst of adults and children and observer of infants has convinced me that teaching of psychopathology and psychotherapy on all levels of education hinges on the understanding of developmental changes not only in childhood and adolescence but also in adulthood. It therefore gives me great pleasure to find that a psychiatrist treating adults (Beulah C. Bosselman), a pediatrician (Ira M. Rosenthal), and a child psychiatrist (Marvin Schwarz) have collaborated in a book on developmental psychiatry which is to serve as a textbook for medical students.

They attempt to present developmental crises and to examine the '… adaptive responses of the child and adolescent in these crises … as determinants of the adult life pattern' (p. 7). In the last particularly valuable chapter on Adaptation to Maturation, they stress the continuity of the developmental process and try to show that even the psychiatric syndromes of the aged have their roots in earlier developmental phases.

As so frequently happens in pioneering work, the book falls short of the high aims of the authors. Intermingled with excellent passages