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This book explores problems of children's anxiety and the defensive tactics used to counteract it. The authors establish affinities between psychoanalysis and Piaget-Werner traditions, and they consider the ways in which developmental ideas highlight and supplement dynamic concepts. The After Image Test and Meta Contrast Technique, which were the experimental research techniques utilized in the study that generated the book, focus on processes of percept construction. Neither had previously been used with children; earlier research involving adults had shown them to be useful measures of the effect of anxiety on reality perception. In addition, the Piagetian landscape text of cognitive egocentrism was used to determine the developmental maturity of each child, particularly with regard to anxiety and its influences on reality perception.
The population consisted of 72 normal school-age children (7 to 15 years of age), 55 normal preschool children (4 to 6 years of age), and 75 clinical children (4 to 16 years of age). Anxiety in some form was a common denominator in all of the clinical children. A pilot group of 30 clinical children facilitated predictions for the larger clinical group. The administration, scoring methods, and schemes of interpretation are clearly defined in the book. The statistical findings were in general accordance with clinical observations. The results supported each other to a high degree; reliability of the data on which they were based was within an acceptable range.
The study provides useful information about normal and deviant child development. Transitions in anxiety manifestations and defense tactics reflect the maturational growth of the child. The authors concur with Schur's position that anxiety manifestations extend from a pole of primary anxiety, in which primitive physiological discharge mechanisms are displayed, to one of much less intense and more effective reactions to danger, the existence of which would be inconceivabl