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This book was written expressly for parents of both normal and disturbed children, for teachers, social workers, and doctors. Its intention is not to offer its readers methods for dealing firsthand with particular emotional problems but rather to provide guidelines for distinguishing between transitory developmental disturbances
and those clinical syndromes that reflect a need for psychiatric treatment. The author has undertaken a difficult task: difficult primarily because among his readers will be a number of parents whose anxiety is easily stirred; and because of the oft-repeated adage, 'a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing'. To my mind, his attempt has met this difficulty with considerable success.
Among the diagnostic categories Shaw has chosen to discuss are schizophrenia, organic disorders (especially in relation to learning defects), psychopathy, and personality (character) disorders. With a refreshing simplicity and forthrightness he describes the clinical manifestations of these disturbances as he views them. One has the sense that the directness that characterizes Shaw's style derives not from naïveté but rather from his keen and sensitive awareness of the vulnerabilities and needs of the particular groups of readers he addresses. Despite his simple and direct approach, he is careful to point out the complexity of things by qualifying his diagnostic descriptions with admonitions that a symptom or group of symptoms, which might seem to correspond with one or another relatively severe illness, might prove upon psychiatric examination to be of minor consequence.
In addition to the phenomenological accounts of the diagnostic categories referred to above, the book includes clinical vignettes which illustrate both specific emotional and/or organic illnesses and psychotherapeutic treatment sessions. It also contains a number of issues with which the child analyst could take exception. These encompass, for example, the understanding of genetic fac