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Work with pediatricians and hospital personnel does not belong to the early extensions of psychoanalytic activity. The application of psychoanalytic child psychology moved very gradually from the understanding of the child's emotional relationships within the family to the understanding of his behavior in nursery school and school, his learning potentialities and inhibitions, his first ties with playmates, his first encounter with community standards, his compliance with or revolt against the teachers' authority. In accordance with the specialization of work in the children's field which obtained at the time, this knowledge was shared only with the professional workers who were engaged with the psychological side of the child's life such as nursery school teachers, teachers, child guidance and juvenile court personnel, while concern with the child's or adolescent's physical health or ill-health remained strictly a medical concern, untouched by insight into the complicating emotional factors.
The gap between mental and physical aspects of child development was closed then, increasingly, due to two separate advances in the psychoanalytic study of the child. One was the move of investigation from the later to the earlier years of childhood, especially to