The Psychiatric Disorders of Childhood: By Charles R. Shaw, M.D. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966. 442 pp.

For many years, those of us involved in the training of young psychiatrists and psychoanalysts had been deprived of a work that would integrate dynamic psychiatry and psychoanalytic concepts with the principles and practices of child psychiatry. Dr. Shaw has essayed this task; regretfully, to my mind, it is both belated and essentially fails in its purpose. Belated because a number of texts have been published in recent years; more especially because Dr. Janet W. Kessler's Psychopathology of Childhood has already set a high standard in scholarship, unification of diverse trends and roots, and stylistic excellence. Her book has set a pre-empting standard against which all other books in this field must now be evaluated. I would suggest that the text under review does not meet this standard, perhaps because Dr. Kessler's is organized along a developmental axis and Dr. Shaw's by subject matter.

Textbooks fall into a number of different categories—compendiums, collections of expertise, personalized monographs, and practicums. This book falls somewhere between the monograph and the practicum. It is as though someone said to Dr. Shaw, 'Your knowledge is extensive, your interest wide, and your practice vivid. Why don't you write a textbook?' In reading this book one is able to enter Dr. Shaw's mode of practice and turn of mind. In these matters his volume is pragmatic, empirical, and heuristic. It is also fuzzy, repetitious, and lacks that theoretical delineation, around which clinical data becomes significant, which allows young people a framework from which a creative clinical posture might ensue and the veteran a renewal of his intellectual vitality.