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Confidently expecting, on the basis of its title, subtitle, and charming jacket illustration, a book about “the child,” that is to say, about children or about the notion of childhood, the reader may be surprised to discover that this densely packed volume consists in large part of lengthy explications and criticisms of psychoanalytic theory. (“Kohutian self psychology is the final reversal of everything Freudian in psychoanalysis” [p. 27]; Anna Freud fails to understand the indeterminacy of psychoanalytic confirmations [p. 32]; René Spitz's notions about the societal implications of secure early object relations in the first year of life are “hysterical” [p. 35]; Winnicott's accounts of mothers are “pernicious” [p. 63].) Pages of extremely lucid and well-written albeit polemical prose are offered in order to make a case for doubting tout court the value of psychoanalytic constructions of “the child.” The standard canon of theorists—Freud, Lacan, Klein, Anna Freud, Winnicott, Fairbairn, Kohut, and others—are all cited with the goal of demonstrating that “the child is the ultimate blind spot of the psychoanalytic project” (p. 23). On the concluding page of her Introduction, the author states: