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The talented professor of psychology at the University of Moscow has given us a book which at least ought to be very highly appreciated by the organicists—those who believe that a psychological event must have something physiological back of it. In this study of human conflicts the physiological events which have been recorded have been the motions of the extremities, the two hands in particular, attached to various devices for recording both voluntary and involuntary motions.
The early part of the book is taken up with a discussion of the examination by the association method of recently arrested criminals— murderers most of them—and the recording of the motor reactions, both to indifferent and to critical words. This part of the book has great interest for criminology, and while the results probably could not be used as evidence, they are certainly of great value as indicating the guilty person. From this point on all sorts of conflicts are studied with the general result that conflicts and affects tend to disorganize conduct. Voluntary efforts on the part of the individual are interfered with and motor reactions, instead of being capable of definite direction, become diffused, dispersed, irregular. The author goes on to define the characteristics of child motor responses and of neurotic motor responses. Roughly speaking, in both of these cases the receptive stimulus tends immediately to find a motor outlet, but in well balanced adults there is what he calls the “functional barrier “raised between the stimulus and the outlet which permits of the organization of conduct along definite lines of expression. The nature of this barrier is discussed, and finally the book closes with an analysis, so far as experiments for that purpose have been devised, of the ways in which behavior is controlled—the nature of will and the part played by cultural factors. It is very interesting here that the author demonstrates that direct methods of control of conduct are futile and that