Behavior and Neurosis: By Jules H. Masserman. (University of Chicago Press; Cambridge University Press, London, 1943. Pp. xv + 269. Price, $3.00; 18s.)

This book is a valuable and important effort to bridge some of the gaps between animal and human psychology, psychopathology and physiology. It is especially to be welcomed that a psycho-analytically orientated investigator should be working in a field for so long cultivated only by reflexologists and behaviourists. The main aim of the book, indeed, is to show that the facts of 'conditioning' and the production and cure of experimental neuroses in animals can be satisfactorily understood only in terms of fundamental psycho-analytic and psychobiological principles, and that the theories of Pavlov and his followers are inadequate to explain the facts.

Masserman lays down four cardinal dynamic principles of behaviour, derived from Freud. First, behaviour is fundamentally motivated by the needs of the organism; second, it is contingent on the demands of the milieu, external and internal, in so far as this is imbued with a configuration of meanings for the individual; third, behaviour is not always a simple and direct fulfilment of elementary needs, but is in large part symbolic and substitutive; and fourth, the motivations of behaviour may become 'conflictful' either through conflict between inner needs or through difficulty in adjustment to complex and contradictory external symbolisms, and this may lead to 'neurotic' or 'psychotic' behaviour.

For Pavlov, behaviour was built up from reflexes. He conceived a reflex as a unitary, stereotyped reaction mediated by a definite sensorimotor engram, and he actively discouraged any mention of the part played by motivation in establishing 'conditioning'. Masserman's work gives first place to the rôle of biological needs; and, in contrast to Pavlov who tried to isolate a 'pure',