Explorations In Child Psychiatry

It is a great pleasure for me to write a foreword to thi~ fine work by many dif­ ferent collaborators under the aegis of my friend and one-time colleague in Geneva, Dr. E. James Anthony, because it represents a collective effort toward a goal that today seems very necessary yet difficult to attain. This goal is the synthesis of developmental psychology with all the other aspects of child psychology into a science of ontogenetic development from birth to maturity encompassing three points of view-the biological, the behavioral, and the internalization of the behavioral into mental life. This synthesis is indeed necessary since it is not possible to understand a disorder or a developmental arrest without having a sufficient knowledge of l the ensemble of elements that has brought it about. At each level of development, the personality of the subject attempts to integrate a multiplex system of factors in varying proportion, and without carefully and fully considering this interdigitating whole, it is not easy to disentangle the mechanisms involved in any particular functional disintegration.