Attachment and Loss. Vol. 3. Loss, Sadness and Depression . By John Bowlby. (Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1980.) £12.00.

Social and educational influences are important in child psychiatry. Graham therefore suggested that there was a need to monitor the changing roles of women in society, the resulting changes in the rearing of children, the effectiveness of health education in schools, and the value of the counselling help available for pre-marital, marital, ante-natal, post-natal, and divorce problems. Specific psychological studies also had their champions. Ricks pleaded for an exploration of the tactics which healthy children use in acquiring early skills. Gwynn Jones spoke of the contributions clinical psychologists can make in psychiatric research. They counterbalance clinical intuition by applying rigorously controlled analyses of human behaviour and by recognizing the multiple and interacting determinants to which such behaviour is subject. The very important task of evaluating the effect of psychotherapies was bravely tackled by Crown. He was convinced that advances in this field can only be achieved through scientifically designed small-scale studies which have the narrow aim of clarifying specific questions of symptom alleviation, social, sexual and work adjustment, stress tolerance, and so on. The upshot of it all seems to have been that each of the many facets of psychiatric research has its own priorities which deserve individual consideration. But the over-riding priority seems to be the need to attract candidates to the psychiatric field who have research aspirations which are suitably fostered for the successful exploration of new avenues in psychiatric classification, pathogenesis and aetiology. Conclusions of this kind have also been drawn recently by other authorities, such as Peart (1979) and Rawnsley (1980).