You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
8th December 1967.
Dear Dr. Dowling,
I am grateful to you for the invitation contained in your letter of 24th November. It is possible that I will not be able to do what you suggest because I am so fully occupied at the present moment.
I want you to consider another point while you are at it. There
cannot be a chapter on the child's mind as if the mind were just like something like the child's liver or the child's blood. The child is a total personality in process of growth and there is no possibility of a statement about the developing human personality except a long one occupying many volumes. It simply cannot be tagged on to a book about napkin rashes and where to get a good cot!
I think perhaps you can see that I am reluctant to be associated with the idea of writing a bit about the child's mind to be inserted in your perfectly good book on the child's functioning body. Of course I may be wrong, and you may find some very good person to write a valuable chapter or two about some aspect of a child's behaviour, or of the things that make for happiness. It would be very bad, however, for me to associate myself with the idea of a bit about the person in a book about bodies looked at from the medical angle which concerns itself with health as the absence of diseases.
I like your book as it is, and I think it has real value, and it would be very easy for you to spoil it by tagging on a little bit about a subject which is really bigger even than the subject of the functioning of the body and everything that the paediatrician stands for.
I wonder if you perhaps don't agree with me. What about taking this letter and showing it to somebody like Dr. Hersov who is at Great Ormond Street, or Dr. Heinz Wolff of the Maudsley, or perhaps John Bowlby? I believe quite an important principle is involved and particularly I think in the type of presentation that is needed when discussion is about the developing human being. For instance, the first thing would be to cut out all advertise