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Every now and then one reads a book about young children which evokes a feeling of delightful discovery. My first reading of Isaacs, Erikson, Anna Freud, Mahler, and Piaget, for instance, not only enhanced my understanding of my own experiences with children but encouraged me to go back and re-examine those experiences. This book impresses me in much the same way.
The author uses protocols of fantasy play observations of three-to-five-year-old nursery school children. She complements this with a review of the observations of Piaget and some reports on young children in a Head Start program. She describes consistencies in cognitive-affective patterns of development as well as sex, individual, and group differences. Her self-appointed task is to show that protocols of this kind can be used for the study of the interrelationship of affective and cognitive capacity in ongoing development. In addition, she explores structure formation, the organization of schemata within the ego and superego, and ego and superego functions which evolve pari passu. She pays particular attention to this evolution as it relates to aggression in both its positive and negative aspects. The development of the moral sense in young children takes up the latter part of the book and includes many different topics ranging from narcissistic issues to the importance of the first year of life and a critique of Piaget's hypotheses.
Certain key concepts are immediately stated and defined. A young child develops a 'sense of entitlement' and a 'wish to please'. These act as affective organizers. They derive from the child's experience