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The assumption that the “state of latency” synchronizes and is synonymous with “the age of latency” is carefully explored and exploded by Charles Sarnoff in Latency, the first comprehensive book devoted in its entirety to the latency period. Through painstaking choice of clinical material, Sarnoff searchingly differentiates between the age of latency, that is from six to twelve years, and what he calls the structure of latency. The latency age is thought of as the educable period, pliable and calm. But can this state be retained under stress? Sarnoff maintains that the structural state of latency is the “result of a variable state of the defenses and not the unchanging product of a diminution of drives.”
As a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Sarnoff's credentials for addressing himself to this subject are unimpeachable. Presently visiting lecturer in child development at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, he also teaches at Hillside Hospital. Having worked with Anna Freud at the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic, his understanding of the ego and its defenses vis-à-vis this particular age period is marked by a sensitive awareness of the applicability of classical psychoanalysis.
Besides the introduction, there are three very interesting appendices dealing with the ontogenesis of the system consciousness, the origins of latency in prehistory, and pathological conditions in latency.