Psychiatry and Psychology in the USSR

Book excerpt: This book is aimed at a professional audience of psychiatrists, psychologists, and educators, as well as Slavic studies scholars and teachers and intelligent lay readers. It would be presumptious to attempt to cover the entire field of Soviet psychiatry and psychology in one modest volume. During the past several decades there has been a remarkable flourishing and diversification of research in psychology and psychiatry in the USSR. What we have attempted to do in this symposium is to present a constructive critical overview of certain limited areas by arranging an interchange of observations and ideas between several American scientists knowledgeable in these fields and a psychologist and psychiatrist who obtained their education and working experience in the USSR. We hope to be able to expand such symposia in the future, so as to cover other important areas of these disciplines. This monograph presents an eyewitness account of Pavlov by W. Horsley Gantt, one of three surviving students of Pavlov, and, to the best of my knowledge, the only American who actually studied and worked with Pavlov. It is a measure of Dr. Gantt's devotion to the development of scientific psychiatry that he went to the USSR to spend six years in Pavlov's laboratory at a time of extreme economic hardship and political turmoil in that country and in the face of having to master a difficult language. In his presentation, Dr.