E. PETERFREUND (in collaboration with J. T. Schwartz). Information, systems, and psychoanalysis an evolutionary biological approach to psychoanalytic theory. (Psychological Issues, Monograph 25/26). New York,  International Universities Press, 1971. pp.  380, $10.

I. SARNOFF. Testing Freudian concepts. New York,  Springer Publishing Co. Inc., 1971. pp.  ix+264. Cloth $8.50, paperback $5.95.

It is interesting to note that while there are increasingly large segments of the population, notably scientists of such varying persuasions as microbiology, geophysics and ecology, questioning the first principles of science and its dubious effect on both man and his environment, we have an increase in enthusiasm for a nineteenth-century scientism among psychoanalysts and dynamic psychologists.

Both Sarnoff and Peterfreund make impassioned appeals for more ‘scientificness’ and logical deductive thinking applied to psychoanalytical theory and practice.

Peterfreund tells us that we must forgo the notion of the qualities of experience because scientific theory tends more toward the universal, away from the data of immediate experience—towards more universal ideas, e.g. physiological, biological, chemical, mathematical, and away from the unique qualities associated with the experiences called ‘mind’.

Many of the most eminent of scientists and various historians of science are showing us that the first principles of science and our theory of knowledge needs renewed attention if we are to salvage anything from the crises we now face as a result of the persuasiveness of ‘scientism’.

The metaphysical foundation of our scientific principles have hardly changed at all since Galileo's conception of the world and of nature, which portrayed the natural world as a vast, self-contained mathematical machine, consisting of motions of matter in space and time: and man, with his purposes, feelings and secondary qualities was shoved apart as an unimportant spectator and semi-real effect of the great mathematical drama outside.

All the other sciences followed this principle, even those branches of science which ostensibly deal with human beings, consistently avoided recognition of the authentic human qualities. This neglect of human experience is still notorious in t