Special Review: The World of the Child1

In the two previous works of the gifted author of “The Child's Conception of the World”2 the form and functioning of the child's thought are considered. In this work it is the content that is under scrutiny. In order to arrive at the nature of this content and to be able to evaluate it he has adopted the clinical method of observation, after having examined very carefully into all of the possibilities of approach to this most difficult subject and the errors and obstacles with which the path of each method is strewn. This clinical method is the one used by the psychiatrist and with which he is so familiar in practice although he may perhaps never have carefully analyzed it in detail or surveyed its possibilities. The author says of the clinical method:

“The clinical examination is thus experimental in the sense that the practitioner sets himself a problem, makes hypotheses, adapts the conditions to them and finally controls each hypothesis by testing it against the reactions he stimulates in conversation. But the clinical examination is also dependent on direct observation, in the sense that the good practitioner lets himself be led, though always in control, and takes account of the whole of the mental context, instead of being the victim of ‘systematic error’ as so often happens to the pure experimenter.”

The material of this book is so significant and of such importance in two directions, namely, as illuminating the psychology of the child, its immediate object, and, secondly, for the psychiatrist, as showing in the stages of psychological development material with which we are so familiar as symptoms of regression in the psychoses.

Part I deals with Realism. The contrast is made between objectivity, which fully realizes the intrusions of the self in thought, and realism, which consists in ignoring the existence of the self and so regarding one's own perspective as immediately objective and absolute. Realism the author thus defines as anthropocentric illusion, final