A History of Child Psychoanalysis by Claudine Geissmann and Pierre Geissmann London/New York:  Routledge, 1998,  xv + 352 pp.

This is the first full-length book on its subject and comes with a preface coauthored by Anne-Marie Sandler and Hanna Segal. So it appears with the endorsements of key leaders of both the Anna Freudians and the Kleinians. Furthermore, A History of Child Psychoanalysis has a foreword by Serge Lebovici, a prominent Parisian student of Anna Freud's. This book not only is Number 30 of the New Library of Psychoanalysis, now edited by Elizabeth Bott-Spillius but was supported with the assistance of the Melanie Klein Trust, the Anna Freud Centre, and the French Ministry of Culture. Despite all this establishmentarianism, A History of Child Psychoanalysis is an excellent work, and future studies in this area will have to rely on it as the pathbreaking innovator.

Lebovici gets the book off to an unfortunately bad start with the claim that Anna Freud's analysis by her father was “no secret” (p. xiii), as were the analyses of the children of some other early analysts. But sophisticated readers will already know of organizational efforts to cover up and prettify the beginnings of psychoanalysis. The authors, both from France, are best on continental matters; despite occasional howlers like that by Lebovici, I