BOOK SHOP

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 890, 24 August 1956, Page 13

BOOK SHOP

N the Book Shop session on Wednesday, August 29, Robert Goodman, of Auckland, will open a discussion on Father Trevor Huddleston’s book, "Naught for Your Comfort."

BB TS

(continued from previous page) timely stimulus to the provision of such facilities. Ably edited by Gerald Caplan, Professor of Mental Health at Harvard, it gives in readable sequence twelve selected case histories with condensed discussion, synthesising commentary and nine research reports. It is the outcome of the International Association for Child Psychiatry meeting in Toronto in August, 1954, and "offers an authori--tative guide to the newest approaches in preventive psychiatry." Section 1 on preventive work should be especially valuable to workers in the newly-formed Child Health Clinics in this country. The level of team work in the psychiatric units, and their interaction with pediatricians, nurses and

social workers is enviable and a model for future reference. Emphasis on the simultaneous treatment of mother and child, sometimes by the same worker, and recognition of the two-way process of mother-child relationships are features to be noted. "The mother is treated for a disorder of her motherhood, and her problems are considered within the framework of her relationship with the child." The wider network of interpersonal relationships involving the whole family has also to be reckoned with. The next section, dealing with the genesis of psychosomatic disorders, the trauma of hospitalisation and. deprivation of maternal care is of very great importance to a wide public, Application of psycho-analytical theory in various research projects reveals the urgent need for more exact data and follow-up studies, "Clinical observation consistently reveals evidence of most inadequate functioning, as mothering persons, on the part of mothers of children manifesting various psychosomatic disorders." Fathers are also involved as irresponsSe partners adding to the child's conict. There is weighty evidence demonstrating the damage caused by sudden and prolonged separation of the young infant from a warm continuous relationship with the mother or adequate substitute. For healthy emotional develop- ment, separation needs to be a gradual process, "which is completed in each separating move by the reunion of the two organisms involved." "The child is using what he is getting from the mother to nourish his growing sense of himself -as a separate ‘I.’ With this evolving feeling he gains the capacity to act as a separate person, supported by the mother who helns him to feel the value of his own separateness, and his own difference from her. Separation without the reunion factor becomes an insulating process , . . and this refrigerated atmosphere denies the child the essential human framework for his own emerging feeling life." The third section of psychosis and ‘the differential diagnosis between psy--chotics and those suffering from severe sensory defects will be illuminating to all working with handicapped children. | The whole volume will be regarded as a classic in this pioneering period of ‘preventive and educational psychiatry.

E.F.

C.