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A psychoanalytic publication, at its best, is the essential teacher, possessed of those gifts which best mobilize and satisfy the pleasures of intellectual mastery. Informed, technically secure, appropriately innovative, fluent, careful, and exciting, the good teacher provokes new questions in the process of satisfying old curiosities and—if especially fine—effectively and compellingly speaks both to old scholars and to new.
Each year The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child exemplifies those standards. Most especially, one is annually impressed by the range of material and application of psychoanalysis today.
It is yet more evidence that psychoanalysis is no narrow, impractical theoretical construction or limited therapeutic tool. It is a body of understanding which has had an immense impact on the institutions of the Western world. Smarting with a sense of individual social impotence, we should be consistently aware of the fact that as a professional group our achievements (whether acknowledged or not) have had a profound effect across a wide social spectrum. This is most especially true in our impact on child-rearing techniques and education. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child has contributed consistently and cumulatively to that impact.
The 1974 volume happily maintains its traditional standards, ranging in subject matter from considerations of classical interest, such as the concept of infantile neurosis, to biographical studies and dynamic interpretations of fairy tales and children's rhymes.
There is a tribute to Berta Bornstein which, in its very form and content, honors her best by exemplifying in her students' work the knowledge, pedagogy, and clinical care of their teacher. The several memorial papers are especially welcome in their summaries of the unpublished as well as published material that Bornstein used as a teacher.
One of the most significant qualities of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child is that it does, indeed, speak to neophytes as well as soph