Children in Collectives. Child-Rearing Aims and Practices in the Kibbutz: Edited by Peter D. Neubauer, M.D. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C Thomas, Publisher, 1965. 408 pp.

Discussing the socialist Israeli Kibbutzim in which children are reared from birth not by their parents, but in groups, David Rapaport said in 1958: 'The upbringing of children in these collectives is for the social scientist what an "experiment of nature" is for the

natural scientist'. He might have added that the problem they present to the psychoanalyst is: How can we uphold our convictions about the importance for healthy personality development of a close relation between mother and infant if infants raised away from their mothers develop stable and successful personalities? Does so radically different a rearing bring in its wake different psychosocial and psychosexual crises? And if so, what new and different conflicts and balances will arise between the inner institutions and what different ways of resolving inner psychic conflicts? How can strong egos and superegos develop without a strongly felt and successfully resolved Oedipal conflict?

When, then, a psychoanalyst reports on the findings of a study group one might have hoped that these and related questions would be answered. But, alas, this volume disappoints us; though such questions are taken up repeatedly in discussion, they are never truly explored and are not answered.

Essentially this is the report of a five-day Institute held in Israel during the summer of 1963 to discuss Kibbutz methods of childrearing. Participants came in about equal numbers from the Kibbutz and from abroad. Nearly all the latter were American, with only two from England and one from Holland. Besides Peter Neubauer, the editor, among those from the United States were such other well-known psychoanalysts as James Anthony, Viola Bernard, Marianne Kris, and Fritz Redl. The rest consisted of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and educators, many of them internationally known as specialists with children.

Ostensibly the two groups got together so that both could profit from an exchange of ideas. Kibbutz rearing