Social Changes and Human Behavior. Mental Health Challenges of the Seventies: Edited by George V. Coelho, Eli A. Rubinstein, and Elinor Stillman. Rockville, Md.: National Institute of Mental Health, 1972. 237 pp.

This volume is a compilation of NIMH seminars of the same title. It was published with the hope of broadening the concepts and improving communications of all workers in the behavioral sciences. The seminars were led by a group of experts in various fields who have attempted to apply the knowledge from their individual disciplines to the understanding of man in his present social milieu. Unfortunately, the only expert with much experience in the study of individual man in depth had completed his psychiatric residency only two years before the seminars. The general slant of the book is therefore much more sociological than psychological and the use of the term 'mental health' in the subtitle is misleading unless one accepts the common but unproved premise that social disturbance is the prime factor in mental disorders.

The book is divided into three sections. Section I is entitled Living Connections and Creative Transformations. The titles of the sections result from the attempts of the editors to integrate diverse papers. Actually this section contains some anthropological contributions. Jerome S. Bruner in The Uses of Immaturity tries to correlate primate evolution with human phylogenetic and ontogenetic development. His thesis is that the prolonged period of immaturity in primates and especially in man allows learning, social behavior, and more diverse adaptive behavior.

Sherwood L. Washburn, in Aggressive Behavior and Human Evolution, writes not so much about aggression as about the evolutionary roots of man's learning through emotionally rewarding personal bonds and socially important objectives. He makes the statement that since apes learn most readily from immediately rewarding activities, the cause of contemporary campus unrest is that we do not apply this principle to humans. The importance of symbolism and the complex subject of intellectual curiosity in the human species is disregarded in this discussion.

The third paper in the first section is by