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This is a beautiful and fascinating book, totally different from any of the books on child analysis that have come the way of the present reviewer. In the first place, it has literary merit; the theme of each chapter is developed logically, with a clarity and beauty of expression that make easy reading; illustrative cases in abundance drive home the author's points. But it is not such easy reading that one's attention is not arrested, time and time again, by sentences that seem axiomatic as we read them, but which are found all too seldom in works on child psychology. One is tempted to go through the book and cull out a collection of such axioms, to keep on one's desk as reminders of what to do or not to do with different types of children.
Mrs. Wickes, judging from her book, would seem to have an entree into that inner world of which she writes that is granted to few people in each generation. Anyone who works with children—or perhaps anyone who recalls vividly an introverted childhood—knows how difficult of access is the “city of child—soul,” how high are the walls and how carefully guarded the gates. Strategy and wisdom are necessary in the beleaguering of that city, and a patience which can wait as one waits for the seasons to ripen the grain one plants. But above all strategy and wisdom and patience is love, for of a little child it is indubitably true, as Mrs. Wickes says “we can have only that part which is revealed to us in love.” “If,” she says in the preface, “we would enter into the inner world of childhood we must take with us two things; love, and an understanding which includes both intuitive perception and deep technical knowledge of those forces which rule our conscious and unconscious life.” These qualifications our author seems to possess in a most unusual degree.
Mrs. Wickes has studied with Jung and her book is written from the standpoint of the Jungian psychology; the first chapter is a brief historical survey of the analytical environment and an