One of the most important issues in contemporary child welfare has to do with the possible benefits and dangers of day care for infants and young children. Like so many problems facing us today, the issue of day care is enormously complex because so many different factors of unknown quantity and degree can contribute to the outcome. And, if that were not enough, we really do not know what, when, and how to measure the outcome. Unlike a laboratory problem that we can define and limit, real life social phenomena challenge our traditional conceptualizations and methodologies and plead for new methods of investigation. The issue of day care, and its impact on children, is a central concern of the two books considered here. In the first book,Infancy: Its Place in Human Development, Jerome Kagan and his colleagues describe an investigation of the effects of a day-care program in Boston's

Infancy: Its Place in Human Development

The social work literature rarely considers critiques and reformulations of psychoanalytic theory, even if these have brought about major shifts in contemporary understanding. I describe the emergence of the relational paradigm and show how overlapping perspectives deepen conceptions of personality development; problems in living; health, well‐being, and the good life; and the therapeutic endeavor. I consider the strengths and limits of the relational paradigm and its relevance for social work theory, research, and practice. I emphasize the need to establish critical perspectives that guide evaluation of constructs in view of the fundamental concerns of the profession.

The Relational Paradigm in Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Social Work Perspective

We tested 1-month-olds for cross-modal transfer of shape between touch and vision using a procedure described by Meltzoff and Borton, but including controls for side bias and stimulus preference. In Experiment 1 (N = 48), infants' looking times to smooth and nubby visual stimuli were not influenced by previous oral exposure to one of the shapes during the preceding 90 s, except for an effect on the first test trial in one group; this effect could have been due to limited cross-modal transfer, to Type 1 error, or to side bias, possibly interacting with a small stimulus preference. The failure of that effect to replicate in a group (N = 16) with less side bias (Experiment 2) suggests that it was not due to cross-modal transfer. Experiment 3 (N = 32), an exact replication of Meltzoff and Borton's experiment, also failed to yield evidence of cross-modal transfer. Overall, there is not good evidence that 1-month-olds can transfer information about these shapes from touch to vision. Future studies exploring the ability to transfer information about other shapes will be easier to interpret if they include controls for side bias and stimulus preference.

Cross-Modal Transfer of Shape is Difficult to Demonstrate in One-Month-Olds

In the wake of the neurobiological "revolution," do mental health professionals still assign etiological responsibility for emotional and behavioral disorders to deficient or harmful parenting? This study investigated differences in attributions of causality by theoretical orientation, professional discipline, areas of practice, familiarity with parent support groups, and demographic characteristics. Implications for policy, research, and practice are discussed.

Children's emotional and behavioral disorders: attributions of parental responsibility by professionals.

In response to concerns expressed by parents of children with emotional and mental disabilities about professionals' attitudes and beliefs, the authors surveyed the views of a sample of clinical so...

Social Workers' Views of Parents of Children with Mental and Emotional Disabilities:

Despite criticisms that psychoanalytic theories are unscientific and culturally biased, contemporary models such as object relations theory and self psychology continue to exert a strong influence on practice. In this article, I evaluate the work of two leading proponents of these theoretical schools, Otto Kernberg (object relations theory) and Heinz Kohut (self psychology), with respect to scientific validation.

Theories of Kernberg and Kohut: Issues of Scientific Validation

In his article on social work and psychotropic medication (Social Service Review, December 1988), David Cohen spells out several roles for social workers in relation to the use of medication. Unfortunately, the merits of his recommendations that social work curricula include content on psychopharmacology and that social workers assume monitoring and advocacy roles on behalf of patients--recommendations with which I strongly concur-are eclipsed by a biased and inaccurate account of the history of the treatment of mental illness and the role of social work in this treatment. For every issue that he addresses, Cohen presents a case against medication without reference to evidence that contravenes his position. For example, in the political sphere, Cohen's rhetoric is intended to persuade the reader that drug treatment, like shock treatment before it, functions not to help relieve suffering but to enforce the social control needs of mental health professionals and to protect psychiatry's dominance of the mental health field. Historically, according to Cohen, social workers have played the role of subservient handmaiden to turf-building, pill-pushing psychiatrists, readily acquiescing to damaging pharmacologic treatments. Only the early social workers in the prepsychotropic era gave priority to patient needs; they "did something we seem to have forgotten to do: they listened to their clients."' Some of Cohen's sweeping generalizations are simply untrue. For instance, early trials of psychotropic medication did not involve merely "a few obscure chemicals tested in the back wards."2 In actual fact, prototypical trials of psychotropic medication were also conducted with patients in the community and in the active multimodal therapeutic milieux of major teaching institutions such as Harvard and Yale.3

Harriette C. Johnson

Papers

Theories of Kernberg and Kohut: Issues of Scientific Validation

Resisting the Evil Empire: Comments on "Social Work and Psychotropic Drug Treatment"