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Among its achievements, this book demonstrates the superior intelligence that an international education and scholarship can produce. Professor Frankenstein reveals a breadth of mastery which is truly astonishing. He is at home with psychoanalytic theory as well as with other, perhaps more worldly, epistemologies.
He adroitly and successfully applies psychoanalytic structural and genetic theory both to the problem of mental retardation and evolving 'normal' intelligence as few psychoanalysts have done. On the whole he is to be congratulated for using psychoanalysis with thoughtful discrimination. For instance, I agree with his doubts that psychoanalytic theories of sexuality, indulging as they do in 'untenable abstraction from structural variables', can be applied even to the intellectually 'normal' child, let alone to the feebleminded. For the latter, Professor Frankenstein finds them 'completely unjustified'.
Professor Frankenstein breaks no new ground in finding the concept of 'mental age' untenable and useless. The fourteen-year-old youth with a mental age of six is not the same developmentally or structurally as the child at the age of six. The author, however, gives the point new emphasis and illumination.
Similarly, the distinctions as well as the relatedness between feeblemindedness and secondary retardation are studied. The former is more or less 'intrinsic'; the latter is largely socially and/or culturally determined—but both types may be irreversible. The social type is that impairment due to growth under conditions of extreme poverty and educational neglect. Cultural retardation results from what Professor Frankenstein calls 'social ambiguity': where the individual and his group have been transplanted from primitive life conditions into a modern technologically oriented society.
For rehabilitation, Professor Frankenstein has much to say concerning the role of parents, teachers, and society. He calls for intensive involvement of parents in schools