Rehavior and Neurosis: By Jules H. Masserman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1943. 269 pp.

When Pavlov and his co-workers began their investigations into conditioned reflexes in dogs, a revolution was occurring in the

biological and psychological sciences. Jacques Loeb was beginning to revise his mechanistic assumptions in the light of his brilliant researches and was soon to emerge with his concept of the organism-as-a-whole. Hans Driesch, studying embryos, was fast becoming an out-and-out vitalist, and Freud had already achieved his epochmaking insights into the purposive aspects of human behavior. But Pavlov did not like revolutions, political or scientific, and spent almost forty years undeviatingly piecing together a nervous system reflex by reflex. How the Russian school of physiologists, dominated by the mechanistic prejudices of their great leader, managed to stay clear of the holism emerging from the coalescing trends elsewhere to be seen in the biological and psychological research of the day, remains a marvel of scientific isolationism. The result, in any case, was a reflexology of such baroque involvedness that despite the best efforts of clinical psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to translate the grammar of this system into something applicable to the problems of psychopathology—and despite the later efforts of Pavlov himself to effect this liaison—nothing was accomplished beyond a vague promise of wonders to come. It was this awkward state of affairs that led Schilder a few years ago to write: 'We cannot interpret the neurosis by means of the conditioned reflex, but by means of the psychic mechanism we have studied in the neurosis we can well explain what occurs in the conditioned reflex.'

The applicability of Schilder's remark is born out by the results of Masserman's experiments with cats, described in this book. Masserman undertook to study the 'total' behavior of cats instead of limiting himself to the observation of isolated, discrete reflexes. His methods were based entirely on the assumptions drawn from comparative psychobiol