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This graceful book is based on a four-month solo field trip to the Soviet Union in 1969. Dr. Rollins does not tell us how she managed to carry off such a feat, nor where she mastered the language. Her book is much more than an account of philosophies, facilities, and people in Soviet child psychiatry. She takes on the question of how cultures, child-rearing styles, and mental health policies interdepend, and her discussion is worth careful study.
The Marxist-Leninist principles on which Soviet society is officially established hold that economic relationships are the most important in human affairs; that human beings are inherently perfectible; that there is a rational solution for all problems; that work is inherently ennobling and pleasurable; that any entity, whether individual or social, is more than the sum of its components; and that the collective is of more consequence than the individual. The trend in Soviet child psychotherapy is to restore the sick child to useful work in the collective as rapidly as possible. This is often done by giving the child a respite from everyday life in the form of 'tranquillizing' therapies, or by means of a brief sojourn in a part-time or full-time institution. Relief of pressure and the promotion of tranquility are goals throughout Soviet psychiatry, in contrast to the American tendency to utilize conflict and emotion in psychotherapy. There is a deep Russian tolerance for inner emotional states, but a reluctance to express them. Prevention of emotional illness receives more attention than in the United States, Dr. Rollins finds. There is also a more intimate connection between physical medicine and mental health. Certain physical conditions such as rheumatic fever are considered to have lasting residues of psychopathology.
Dr. Rollins describes the long-standing rejection of freudian psychoanalysis by the Russian intelligentsia. Freud's postulation of unconscious irrational forces, his pessimistic view of humanit