You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a contribution of five psychoanalysts, Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein, Merrill P. Middlemore, Nina Searl, and Ella Freeman Sharpe. Dr. Rickman contributes a preface and a list of books on childhood—many of them non-psychoanalytic—concludes the volume. The keynote of the book is struck in the preface, when Dr. Rickman points out that
psychoanalysis has not only enabled us to plan intelligently for a child's upbringing, but “gives us an insight into the mind of the young child which has deepened our emotional and living understanding of that all-important bond—the relation between parent and child.”
The lectures that follow (the book is based upon a course of lectures given in London in 1935) deal with planning for stability, weaning, the uses of sensuality, children's questions and how to answer them, habit formation, and the nursery as a community; and though there is nothing new to the psychoanalyst in them, there are some points that would certainly sound strange to an American audience. The use of the pacifier, for instance,—the “comforter,” as it is called in England—as an aid in weaning. The pacifier is universally used in England, though American babies have gotten along without it for a generation. There is the assumption also, on the part of several of the authors, of much more attention and handling than the American mother is taught to give her infant. And the long discussion by Dr. Isaacs (in the chapter on Habit) of the baby's struggles with the “pot” would sound rather strange to an audience accustomed to bringing up its babies on nursery chairs and “little toidies.”
But these are minor matters. The book is useful as an exposition of the principles of child-rearing according to analytic doctrine, and it supplies a real need in this respect. The parent with some psychoanalytic training or the one who has been analyzed and who asks for something on child training which exemplifies psychoanalytic points of view can safely be directed to this little vo