Book excerpt: In So the Witch Won't Eat Me Bloch draws on 25 years of psychoanalytic practice. Her book is both a summary of her experience as a therapist and a disclosure of what she has learned about the inner workings of the human mind. She believes that the fear of infanticide, which originates in our vulnerability as infants, is later compounded by the magical thinking that leads us as children to blame ourselves for any unhappy development in our environment and therefore to anticipate punishment. As she also demonstrates, psychoanalytic treatment can be very effective in resolving the resulting emotional problems.