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Dr. Koppitz, an educator and school psychologist, has made a heroic effort to combine the intimacy of the clinical approach with the rigorous demands of statistical classification of groups oriented toward detection, screening, classification, and prediction. She is less convincing in the posture of the statistical 'scientist' than in her capacity for warmth, intuition, and insight revealed in the individual case illustrations. In her group studies, she makes limited use of the potentials for comprehensive analysis of the individual inherent in projective drawings. Were it possible to combine the clinical and statistical, the book would have made a unique contribution. While some of the facts and opinions are of interest to the clinician, the offer of practical, tangible, and simple solutions that provide the enduring truth are only misleading aspirations.
Analogues of the conflict between the statistical and clinical approach are seen by Dr. Koppitz in the Goodenough-Harris use of drawings for the measurement of intellectual maturity and the Machover projective analysis of human figure drawings. She purports to improve upon the limitations of both. The author erroneously regards the Machover approach as dealing with only the emotional aspects as contrasted with the Goodenough system which is restricted to the intellectual aspect, as if they were separate and distinct parts of the total person. Organic items are also added to the checklist. Dr. Koppitz ignores the fact that the projective drawing principles, which cover the structure and content of a figure drawn, derive from the essential and universal focus of the body image and provide a guide for the understanding of the whole individual in his dynamic complexity. The author offers a scale comprised of thirty developmental (intellectual) items, drawn mostly from the longer Goodenough scale, thirty emotional and eleven organic items. No weighting or syndroming of items for clinical significance is attemp