The Therapeutic Nursery School: A Contribution to the Study and Treatment of Emotional Disturbances in Young Children. Robert A. Furman and Anny Katan (Eds.). New York:  International Universities Press, 1969.  xi+329 pp.

The title of this book does not reveal the uniqueness of the work done in the Hanna Perkins School of Cleveland, which is based on Anny Katan's introduction of psychoanalytic treatment of children under five years of age “via the mother.” This is very different from methods used in other well-known psychoanalytic treatment centers (e.g., the Child Development Center in New York City). In other centers too the young children attend a therapeutic nursery school, but they, as well as their mothers, are simultaneously treated, each by an individual therapist.

In the Preface Anna Katan describes her work in Holland in 1937, when she wondered how to provide treatment for a four-year-old bedwetter whose mother traveled for many hours, partly on foot, to reach her office. She found the solution by deciding to try Freud's successful treatment method in the classic case of little Hans, in which Freud advised the father how to treat his boy's phobias. Anny Katan's first treatment via the mother was so successful that she continued this method, which she describes in a longitudinal perspective in this book. The study's aim was to assess the effectiveness of treatment via the mother as compared with therapy for mother and child. Of the sixty-two children used for this fifteen-year study, thirty-four were treated via the mother.

The method used was very carefully designed: the developmental profile just then completed by Anna Freud and her Hampstead Group was used for determining each child's emotional and developmental stage at entry into the school and again at the time of leaving. A third profile was constructed for assessing each child years later, during latency or early adolescence, for the follow-up study. At the end of the book there is a separate chapter on the treatment of children with psychosomatic disorders, which posed specific problems that the research group developed special methods for diagnosing.

For deciding a mother's suitability for inclusion in the study, the