Psychotherapy in the Soviet Union: Edited and translated by Ralph B. Winn, Ph.D. New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1961. 207 pp.

This cross-section of contemporary Russian psychiatry contains thirty-five papers, most of them very short. Unfortunately, no references indicate when and where the papers originally appeared; the accuracy and quality of their translation could be judged by this reviewer in only a single instance, where it proves to be fluent, perhaps somewhat free, but adequate.

Soviet psychiatry is based theoretically on Pavlovian premises. Miassischev's important paper is no exception. However, in his view 'the legacy of Pavlov … does not consist merely in automatically repeating Pavlov's words, but rather in deepening and making more intelligible our conception of man, in all his activities, as a union of psychology and physiology'. The author goes on to say that Pavlov's critical attitude toward the psychology of his day was directed rather against 'any type of idealistic methodology'; indeed, 'Pavlov put the psychoclinical approach to health and disease ahead of the physiological one'. Pavlov even expressed the conviction that, in order to clarify the function of psychology in psychiatry, it is absolutely necessary to bring psychology and physiology into a very close relationship. Miassischev is of the opinion that scientific achievements in the physiology of the higher neural centers and activities have provided 'the knowledge of the laws of normal neural activity, complex interrelations among individual processes, and mechanisms of pathological deviation'; Pavlov's concept that the secondary signal system exists exclusively in man best explains the regulatory function of these processes. He said, 'Words can serve as real conditioning stimuli beyond any quantitative or qualitative comparison with any other stimulation in animal life'. Thus, speech is the most significant apparatus in human beings subject, however, to certain specific laws which have not yet been sufficiently studied as an integral part of normal or pathological physiology.

Miassischev distinguishes 'two