Book Reviews - Comptes rendus de lecture V.M. BEKHTEREV (LLOYD H.STRICKLAND, ED., TZVETANKA DOBREVAMARTINOVA, TRANS.) Suggestion and Its Role in Social Life New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998, 215 Pages (ISBN 1-56000-340-5, US$39.95, Hardcover) Reviewed by DAVID BAKHURST Vladimir Bekhterev (1857-1927) is one of Russian psychology's most interesting and engaging figures. Bekhterev was leading reflexologist. He was pre-eminent neuroscientist in Russia, an expert clinician and skilled hypnotist. He was also far-sighted administrator, who created several important research institutions, including massive St. Petersburg Psychoneurological Institute, private university run on unusually liberal and democratic lines. At his death, Bekhterev was arguably most influential figure in Russian psychology; he left hundreds of disciples. It is curious, then, that Bekhterev is now forgotten man. The source of his neglect lies in his rivalry with Pavlov. Particularly towards end of his career, Bekhterev, like Pavlov, sought comprehensive, objective psychology founded on concept of reflexes. The two scholars, however, could not have been more different. Bekhterev was renaissance man with humanistic ideals. Pavlov, in contrast, was narrow specialist who declared himself psychasthenic (i.e., bereft of all artistic sensibilities). While Pavlov was primarily laboratory scientist, Bekhterev was, in Alex Kozulin's words, a physician-practitioner, whose considerable clinical experience led him to appreciate messy reality of human psychology and social life. Pavlov disdained Bekhterev's speculative theorizing and his cavalier approach to experiment and data collection. Bekhterev, in turn, loathed Pavlov's positivism and resented his reputation as founder of theory. After Bekhterev's death, his many followers became embroiled in bizarre ideological battles that divided Soviet academic world. In this, their mentor's breadth of vision was liability. Bekhterev's reflexology had pretensions to explain social phenomena, and could thus be denounced as heretical challenger to historical materialism. Thus, by late-1930s, no Soviet psychologist would admit his debt to Bekhterev. The situation became still worse in next two decades when, with Stalin's blessing, Pavlov reigned supreme as hero of Soviet psychology. Vygotsky's students preserved his ideas and were able to resurrect them after Stalin period. But there was no one left to fight for Bekhterev. He became remembered merely as lesser Pavlov, as man who deserves acknowledgement in histories of Soviet psychology, but whose ideas are no longer of interest. Anyone who reads Bekhterev's 1908 monograph, Suggestion and its Role in Social Life, will quickly see folly of this assessment. The book, appearing now in English for first time, is study of contagion (i.e., of ways in which our minds are influenced other than by rational argument, reasonable persuasion, or conscious reflection). In this, term reflex is conspicuous by its absence. Rather, central explanatory notion is suggestion, to which Bekhterev was drawn by his considerable experience with hypnosis, and which he defines as the direct induction of psychic states from one person to another by words or gestures (p. 13). The text proceeds to survey great variety of phenomena illustrating suggestion at work. These include cases of: (i) humans' psychological attunement to each other, such as one person's involuntarily imitating another's stutter or someone's cheerfulness infecting others; (ii) formation and maintenance of false and irrational belief, or inappropriate or exaggerated desires and emotions, for example, in religious sects or in cases of mass hysteria; and (iii) phenomena of crowd psychology, such as panic, mob violence, or revolutionary fervour. Bekhterev presents all this in fascinating succession of short chapters in which he describes panoply of psychic epidemics - of murder, financial speculation, free love, witchcraft and devil-possession - as well as heart-wrenching material about mass suicides of religious cults, and stories of mass hallucinations, mesmerism, and influence of heroes and orators. …