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This annual has slowly become a very welcome and eagerly anticipated volume. This most recent issue is perhaps higher in the quality of its
papers than any of the preceding volumes. Furthermore, it is far more closely knit around the problems of child analysis than some of the others. No papers are here reprinted from other publications—all are apparently seeing print for the first time. This eliminates useless padding and duplication of publication. There are some twenty-three papers of varying length covering many aspects of child analysis—theoretical, technical, clinical and experimental. All are of a high interest and indicate a gradually increasing objectivity of the workers in this field.
The first six papers are entitled “Symposium on Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology” and consist of papers read at the Panel of the same title held at the meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in Detroit on April 29, 1950. These contributions are by H. Hartmann, Hoffer, E. Kris, R. M. Loewenstein, B. Rank and D. MacNaughton and R. A. Spitz. They form the high spot of this volume, since they represent important advances in theoretical formulations in the study of ego psychology.
From this section of seventy-four pages as well as a review of the contents of the four earlier volumes, one is again impressed with the, by now obvious, fact that the New York group of analysts is being led into advancing and exploring untapped areas by an outstanding team of brilliant theoreticians and clinicians consisting of Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Spitz and K. R. Eissler. These are the men who are widening and deepening the pioneering work of Freud. The problems and development of the psychology of the ego is apparently gaining a position in the forefront of psychoanalytic thinking as, at one time, the problems of the id were the main preoccupations of this school. It will certainly prove as faithful for all fields of biological knowledge as was the study of the id. It be