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This volume contains nine papers, with discussions, mostly by Canadian investigators. There were altogether thirty-one participants, many of them M.D.'s, some of them psychologists.
Robert B. Malmo, Ph.D., contributed a highly technical but stimulating paper on 'activation', roughly, the state of alertness and arousal. This can be studied by various methods, for instance, EEG recordings. Although activation can be increased under various conditions of stress, it is individually specific.
Harold Liddell's work on the biological basis for psychopathology is by far the most interesting in this series and should be stimulating to the analyst. Since 1924 the author has been working with Pavlov's conditioned reflexology. Experimenting with goats and sheep, he observes that mere monotony in the repetition of stimuli will put an animal into a 'psychological strait-jacket' and that even under optimal circumstances, with as little restriction as possible and even unhampered by a 'training harness', a traumatic neurosis is always produced. There was one remarkable exception: animals a few weeks old subjected to experiments in the presence of their mothers showed no traumatic aftereffects. In contrast, animals separated from their mothers and subjected to one hour daily testing, starting when they were less than twelve hours old, died within a few weeks in spite of the best care. One of the most striking observations was made on a goat removed from the mother five minutes after birth. One hour later they were reunited. The mother did not resume the licking activities which always take place after birth. She made no attempt to help the kid to nurse. The young animal had great difficulty in nursing and continued to lag behind her twin sister in development. This was still evident at twenty-two months of age. The first animal was sluggish, gained less weight, and showed little vigor and vivacity. At seven weeks both animals were subjected to stress experiments in