One Little Boy

Hyman Miller, M.D. Gollans. 13/6. This is the story of the treatment by a clinical psychologist of a seven year old boy who suffered from asthma. Although the case material is used to illustrate the boy's unconscious phantasies, his hidden aggression and sexual wishes, the form used is more that of a novel. A good deal of skill is employed in rounding off each chapter and in starting the next with a vivid happening and the plot is enhanced by the novelette stories of both the parents who at the same time are being tempted to break their marriage vows ?figures which might have stepped out from a Hollywood film. We are assured this is a true story and that nothing has been attributed to Kenneth which he did not say or do. At the age of 12, he read and checked the manuscript (heaven help him!). To English readers however, the form in which the book is presented, the cheap drama of the parents' encounters with the opposite sex, and indeed some sentimentality about the boy, make it hard to accept it for the serious case study which it is. There is real value in the repeated emphasis on the fact that all