Volume 10, Number 9 · May 9, 1968
Thanks for the Memory
By D.W. Harding
The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory
by A.R. Luria
Basic Books, 160 pp., $4.95
Not only was the subject of this book a prodigy, a man with a memory so 'good' as to be pathological, but the book too is a portent in the present state of scientific psychology. Professor Luria was prominently associated with the psychoanalytic movement in Russia in the days before official opinion had established that Freud was a bad thing, but his psychological work since then, highly respected in the Soviet Union and the West, has been ideologically blameless. His studies of language, thought, and conflict have been experimental, and the title of his best known book, Higher Cortical Functions in Man, has the true Pavlovian ring. Yet now without hesitation or apology he plunges in among mentalistic concepts galore—images, fantasies, sensations, perceptions, desires, emotions, attention—and the study not only includes introspections but entirely depends on them. You might be reading a psychological report of 1905, but here it is, written in 1965, and now warmly endorsed by Jerome Bruner of Harvard. The fact is that currently respectable terminology and method would not have served, and a purist experimenter determined to countenance no departure from the objective and 'measureable' would have thrown away an immense opportunity.
Review, 2301 words
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