Child Development: Readings in Experimental Analysis: Edited by Sidney W. Bijou and Donald M. Baer. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967. 408 pp.

The psychoanalyst who approaches this volume in the hope of enlarging his grasp of child development studies within a familiar context will, at the very least, be surprised and a bit disoriented. He will find himself immersed in the jargon of behaviorist psychology and reviewing a collection of reports, not so much of child development as of experiments in operant conditioning and their applications to clinical and educational problems.

It is necessary at the outset for the reviewer to confess a personal bias against work of this kind. Much of it appears dry and deanimated, with many references to 'Ss' and 'Es', profusions of tables and statistics, and a total absence of consideration of motivation, affect, or any mental operation intervening between stimulus and behavioral response. The experiments, many of them ingenious and disarming in their simplicity, are not so much inhuman as dehumanized. A comparison, say, between Method for Studying Exploratory Behavior in Infants by Rheingold, et al., and Peter Wolff's monograph on neonatal behavior exposes the aridity of the behaviorist approach and the richness and heuristic potential of psychoanalytically informed observational research. One might also