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This publication, including many illustrations, consists of more than a thousand separate pages reproduced from typewritten sheets and is assembled in a loose-leaf binding. Seventy research reports, reviews, and essays from the Russian literature are offered in translation. The English is probably faithful, yet the text does not read as smoothly as it might had it been composed by someone familiar with the subject matter.
Several types of articles are included. Philosophic papers, arguing the correctness of dialectical materialism and Pavlov's conditioned reflex theory as the only legitimate approaches to psychology, are perhaps most distant from what we in the West consider scientific. In some investigations of the behavior of children the examination of conditioning is the primary method. In studying the physiology of central nervous system function, the phenomena attending conditioning are the primary areas of interest. On the other hand, there are some impressive neurophysiologic, neurochemical, and anatomic studies. In general, except for several papers on genetics which deal extensively with philosophy, it seems that the more removed the study is from psychology and behavior, the more it resembles what we would consider first-class, sound, scientific work. There is unfortunately very little clinical material in this collection.
The authors cite some non-Soviet literature—American, English, German, and French. Little as it is, it seems to me to exceed by far the references in American papers to European sources. Psychoanalysis is mentioned at times, but always disparagingly as 'idealistic'.