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This little book is the first contribution from the European Child Guidance Clinics to reach America in translation. It is the outgrowth of the work which has been done by Alfred Adler and his co-workers,
and most of the illustrative cases have been culled from the wealth of material offered by Adler's Child Guidance Clinics in Vienna.
The introduction tells us that the book is “dedicated to the task of giving to parents and teachers an insight into the peculiarities of a child's soul life; it is a guide to development of character in the child and a key to the understanding of the fundamentals of a rational psychology.”
To the present reviewer, the book, itself, hardly seems to fulfill this prefatory promise. It deals with nervous symptoms in children, the causes of nervousness, its prophylaxis and treatment. In very sketchy fashion it has something to say about almost all of childhood's faults. As we should expect, most of them are characterized by Adlerian organic inferiority and compensation. However, the book is exceedingly interesting as giving us an insight into the type of work that is being done with children in the European Clinics, though to the intelligent layman who has followed the development of clinical work with children in this country, there will be little that is new.