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This little book, translated from the German, is based upon a series of lectures given under the auspices of the New Education Fellowship by the author who is professor of child psychology in the University of Vienna. Most of the material is from Dr. Bühler's own work, though she has made use of that of other English and Continental psychologists also. Her concern is chiefly with the “normal average child “, though, as director of a children's clinic, she has had considerable experience with personality deviations in children.
Psychological tests as a means of studying children and adolescents have not been developed in Europe as they have in this country. It is necessary to keep this in mind, for the book deals with the same situations which have been made familiar to us through the child study centers at Yale, Columbia, Iowa, California, and numerous other colleges and universities.
Dr. Bühler's study begins with an inventory of the first year of life, and investigates development in various fields of personality in subsequent years, up to sixteen or seventeen, when, our author says, the adolescent has reached the point where he begins to” give himself an account of his life to date, and to look forward into the future and decide what he ought to do”. At this point she considers adolescence to be concluded and maturity reached. Americans would hardly agree that at sixteen or seventeen the average youth is physically and emotionally mature enough to consider the developmental period over. It is true that the European youth is expected to mature early, but such authorities as Godin and Maranon contend that such maturity is factitious, and detrimental to the future personality.
In a concluding chapter on the influence of heredity and environment on the development of character, Dr. Bühler discusses an experiment under way in Vienna in which a limited number of children are studied in their home environment over long periods of time. A technique of studying constantly oc