The Personality of the Pre-School Child
- Author:
Dr Werner Wolff. Heinemann Medical Books,
Ltd. 25s.
Throughout this book the emphasis is laid on the difference between the viewpoint of the young child, and that of the adult. The child explores the world not only to gain knowledge but also to differentiate himself from his environment, and all expressions of his personality are variations of the one theme: the child’s search for his self. Behaviour in the young child similar to that of the adult may in fact arise from very different roots, and mean something very different. With this in mind, Dr Wolff has after some fifteen years of study evolved certain methods of exploring the depths of the child’s personality as shown in his different modes of expression?in drawing, in movement and in gesture. He has followed the Behaviourist School by careful observation, but has refrained from drawing any conclusion until he has obtained the child’s own statement, and in its environmental context. Close studies and a number of experiments have been made on a group of three to five-year olds. From the point of view of the child therapist, the chapters on Principles of Children’s Art, and Intelligence in the Pre-school Child should be of great value. The child’s ability to express certain relationships in the emphasis given, for example, to certain aspects of the human body, to the total elimination or partial suppression of other parts, appears to arise from unconscious sources, and each young personality appears to express in drawing a certain rhythmic proportion which is characteristic throughout. This has been called the R.Q. (or rhythmic quotient) and Dr Wolff shows how this can be estimated, and in an integrating personality it appears to bear a steady relationship to the I.Q. Where a discrepancy between I.Q. and R.Q. occurs, it may suggest an overstraining of intellectual functions, or a chaos of emotional drives. In the pre-school child, whose life pattern is more determined by his unconscious than by his conscious life, his sensing of relationships as expressed in drawing can indicate normal or abnormal changes in personality.
Dr Wolff disagrees with the application of certain of the psychoanalytical principles; he lays greater stress on the mother’s more exclusive influence throughout the pre-school period, and considers that each child needs very individual understanding in order to appreciate the symbolism expressed, but he himself becomes somewhat dogmatic and over-simplified at times, especially in his chapter on the insecure and secure child.
The book is at times repetitive?some of the quotations of the children seem unreal in the rather too adult phraseology?but it is a careful and sincere effort which takes the study of the pre-school child a considerable step further.
Anyone who is associated with nursery school work, and educational psychologists concerned with young children, should find the book of great interest, and the bibliography is a very complete one. M.C.
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