Comparative Psychopathology, Animal and Human: Edited by Joseph Zubin, Ph.D. and Howard F. Hunt, Ph.D. New York: Grune and Stratton, Inc., 1967. 350 pp.

This volume contains the proceedings of the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the American Psychopathological Association, held in 1965. It includes the text of fourteen papers and some brief discussions. The papers vary in nature and quality from experimental reports to occasional remarks or theoretical discussions. Some are new and interesting, others dull.

The subject of comparative psychopathology is an important one. From animal behavior we can learn of the more primitive homologues of the component elements of human behavior. Also, if there are true animal homologues of human mental illness—and there do seem to be some—they can be used for screening proposed therapeutic procedures. However, the data lend themselves to more than one interpretation so that different investigators come up with interesting explanatory principles, but unequivocally valid, novel, and undeniably effective therapies for human illness have yet to be derived from animal studies. The only possible exception is the application of conditioning procedures to humans for the purpose of alleviating specific phobic anxieties.

John Calhoun's paper demonstrates how much of social behavior among animals can be explained by ecological factors, and in fact, induced by experimental alterations of ecologic circumstances. William Etkin reviews some of the ethologically observed mechanisms by means of which individual animals coöperate to create an integrated and cohesive social organization. Benson Ginsburg, in an impressive argument, calls attention to the fact that the heterogeneity