Marjorie McDonald's book is a model for the application of psychoanalytic insights to an important social problem. The social issue—individual and group reactions to skin color differences—was studied 'within the natural setting of a child's life in an integrated [therapeutic nursery] school' (p. 31) rather than through artificial experimental procedures. The sophistication of the teachers who carefully gathered the observational data on which the theoretical and practical conclusions were based could only be found in a setting like the Hanna Perkins School in Cleveland, Ohio.

The study began with the idealistic decisions to integrate the nursery