This booklet is a report of the transactions of a conference sponsored and conducted by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. The invited participants consisted of approximately twenty-five investigators prominent in the fields of pediatrics, obstetrics and psychiatry.
Almost half the book is devoted to the prenatal influences of maternal physiologic and psychologic states on the fetus and the subsequent effect on the behavior of the newborn. The concepts of prenatal influences are older than recorded history, but an objective study of them in the light of recent knowledge concerning psychosomatic relationships opens a vast field for research on the newborn. The papers and discussions which constitute this report typify a recent trend of the application of psychoanalytic concepts to clinical pediatrics.
The individual papers are of such diverse material and the discussions of them appear in such brief abstracted form that a comprehensive review of them is impossible. To choose