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Pichon's book is planned as a text book for child psychologists, child psychiatrists, consulting psychologists, social workers; in short, for all who deal with the child's development and its abnormalities. As such it shows the usual organization of a text book on child psychiatry. It deals with the general approach to the child, with the methods of mental diagnosis such as interviews and tests. It enumerates mental syndromes known in child pathology, be they somatic, as in idiocy and imbecility, or purely psychological, as in enuresis and pavor nocturnus. Finally it deals with educational principles and with therapy. All these parts are not original. They can be found in any American handbook on child psychiatry. Carl Rogers' The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child,2 for example, gives all the information Pichon offers on the subject, and much more—it is based on a greater clinical material and incorporates more literature.
However, one portion of Pichon's book, the largest part, can legitimately claim originality; it gives an account of the child's development from birth to maturity. The originality lies not in a lot of new material but in the attempt, for the first time as far as we know, to give a picture of human development based on the findings of psychoanalysis and, at the same time, of experimental child psychology. Our review is limited to a report of this section of the book, and shows how Pichon attempts this synthesis.
He does so by a method of presentation that seems at first sight extremely plausible and natural. He views the child's development from two aspects, the emotional and the intellectual: the first, by means of psychoanalysis, the second, by means of experimental child psychology.
His description of the child's emotional development follows in the main rather closely the account that Freud has given in the Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex and that Anna Freud has elaborated in her books. As does psychoanalysis, Pichon div