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.
Dr. Morgenstern is one of the veteran psychoanalysts of Paris. She here presents a monograph of 109 pages, without bibliography nor index,—as is usual with French works—which deals with the phantasy life of the child and with the mechanisms which permit the unconscious impulses to some form of expression. The form of expression explicitly dealt with in this very stimulating work is that of drawing, hence the 77 reproductions of children's drawings which further her central themes.
The approach is one midway between that for the experimental analyst and the general reader and we feel she does not fall between the two stools.
While other products of the creative imagination of children offer equally valuable opportunities for becoming aware of unconscious impulses, such as play, stories, sculpture, constructions of various kinds. Each in turn is discussed, the main accent however falls upon the interpretation of the spontaneous drawings, either as isolated productions or as parts of a game into which the child is introduced.
The especially interesting aspects of the book are those associated with the interpretations and the part played by these in the therapy of many of the children whose histories appear in the book. The insights into symbolizations of this type which Freud originally set forth in his bringing together the relations of phantasy, play, artistic creations, etc., are in line with those which have come to us from practicing psychoanalysts everywhere, but more notably from Anna Freud in Vienna and Melanie Klein in London.