The Nature of Human Conflicts: An Objective Study of Disorganization and Control of Human Behavior: By A. R. Luria. Translated and edited by W. Horsley Gantt. New York: Liveright, Inc., 1932. 431 p.

This book, which comes with a welcoming and approving foreword by Adolf Meyer, is at one and the same time stimulating and provocative, baffling and disappointing. The author is a professor of psychology at the Academy of Communistic Education, and Research Associate at the State Institute of Experimental Psychology in Moscow. His translator and editor, W. H. Gantt, is associated with the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and is known for his excellent translation of Pavlov's Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes. The Russian origin of the present work and the earlier activities of the translator might lead the reader to expect that in this book, too, there would be found an application of the theory and methods of the conditioned reflex. In his preface, however, the author makes it clear that he is neither a psychoanalyst nor a behaviorist nor a "simple neurodynamical" empiricist, nor does he believe "that the problems of the most complicated forms of human behavior can be solved by the analysis of the conditioned reflex …" (xii). We are therefore left in no doubt as to those current schools of thought from which the author wishes to disassociate himself. Unfortunately, however, even the most careful study of the book leaves one groping for the author's positive point of view.

Limited as we are to a study of this translation, it is difficult to gauge how much of this uncertainty may be due to original obscurity