British Journal of Medical Psychology

Ferenczi, Sandor. The Adaptation of the Family to the Child.

Baynes, H. C. Freud versus Jung.

Rickman, J. On Some of the Standpoints of Freud and Jung.

Burrow, T. Biological Foundations and Mental Methods.

Ferenczi, S. Family and Child.—The author speaks of this contribution as some free associations on children's education. The title, he says, is unusual, since the adaptation of the child to the family is usually emphasized, but here he would accent the reverse, i.e., try to understand the child. Physiology has much to learn from pathology and so psychoanalysis has taught us much about healthy requirements in the family constellation. Unhealthy parents often reap the whirlwind in their children. Psychoanalysis, he says, can tell more about dont's than do's at present in child education. The child is in need of study.

The adjustment of the family to the child cannot take place till the parents first of all understand themselves and thus get some grasp of the pathology of the mind. Up to now it has often been taken for granted that parents are endowed with a natural knowledge of how to bring up their children, though there is a German proverb which says the opposite: “It is easy to become a father but difficult to be one.” The first mistake that parents make is to forget their own childhood; even in normal people we find an astonishing lack of memory of the first five years of life, and in pathological cases the amnesia is even more extensive. These are years in which the child is really at the level of and the equal of adults—

and yet they are forgotten! So the lack of understanding of their own past childhood proves to be the greatest hindrance to parents grasping the essential questions of education.

Ferenczi then tries to deal with the practical problems connected with the ways in which parents can adapt themselves to their children. Nature is very careless, she does not care for the individual, but human beings are different, they wish to save the liv