Excerpt from A Study of the Mental Life of the Child

The appearance of this book in English translation should be welcomed by all serious students of the periods of infancy and early childhood, - not because the claim can be made for it that it represents the outcome of a judicial weighing of all the factors that go to make the infant and the child that which they are, but because it describes, in almost monographic form, a certain, very important, group of these factors, - of which nothing would be known but for the work of Sigmund Freud, whose views the author of this treatise faithfully reproduces.

Whatever differences of opinion may be held about some of the bearings of these views, the time is now long past when any one who cares for the truth about the matters to which they pertain can excuse himself for treating them with neglect. To do so would be to neglect the most thorough study which ever has been published, of a set of influences, or motives, which have a vast amount to do with the development of the poetical, literary, religious, philosophical and esthetic tendencies in human nature, and which serve indirectly (through giving rise to "conflicts") as fruitful causes of defects of character, unhappiness, and positive illnesses of pronounced sorts. To some extent the desires to which these motives correspond belong to what might be called the "underworld of human thought."

The most significant of the earlier contributions to the history of infancy and early childhood came from men and women who strove to record with fidelity the sayings and doings of their own children. The plan was unexceptionable, but it should be recognized that where the thoughts, feelings and emotions of a human being are the object of study, the ability to "see and hear" is limited, almost rigorously, by the ability to "understand." An observer is not a phonograph, but a person, whose seeing and hearing is largely a selecting, carried on with deference to a set of opinions, mainly preconceived though subject to constant modification. One's senses, urged forward or held back by one's personality, rush to confirm, or hasten instinctively to turn away from, what one's education has led one to regard as noteworthy or objectionable, as the case may be, in the light of what one knew or felt or hoped for or had learned to look on with disfavor or disgust.

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