Hacker News Reader

Comment by EdwardCoffin | Hacker News Reader

In section 17, Stress-Influence Tendency (p21-22), he mentions some final work by Pavlov, but doesn't provide a citation. I spent some time trying to find it when I first read this years ago, but was unable to. I'm wondering whether it's even reliable: I'd think that work by Pavlov could be found with him as an author, rather than in a "popular paperback" written by an un-named psychiatrist. If anyone knows what book he must have been talking about, or can point to the particular papers by Pavlov, I'd like to know.

View on HN

Not sure if it is the case here at all. But sometimes those old Soviet-bloc "original research" documents can be hard to find. An example of this elsewhere is the Levenshtein distance -- everybody knows what this is, but the actual original document was a Soviet-era journal: Влади́мир И. Левенштейн (1965). Двоичные коды с исправлением выпадений, вставок и замещений символов [Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals]. Доклады Академий Наук СCCP (in Russian) 163 (4): 845–8. Appeared in English as: Levenshtein, Vladimir I. (February 1966). "Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals". Soviet Physics Doklady 10 (8): 707–710.

Given the productivity of Russian academics and the difficulty in obtaining a lot of these journals, has there been a concentrated effort to make these available for a modern, web-enabled audience?

That would be quite interesting to know actually.

Another possibility that occurred to me is that the subject matter of this particular paper is pretty unpleasant, perhaps any potential translators simply shied away from it.

""...popular paperback, written by some Rockefeller-financed psychiatrist, when I was trying to figure out..""

https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mind-Brainwashing-Evangelists-...

"In 1938 Sargant was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship" says author's wiki. I think this book fits the bill.

It does indeed seem to be the book. Thanks.

The author seems to be controversial. The Wikipedia entry on him [1] says things like "his reliance on dogma rather than clinical evidence have confirmed his reputation as a controversial figure whose work is seldom cited in modern psychiatric texts.", and others "described him as 'autocratic, a danger, a disaster' and spoke about 'the damage he did'".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sargant

Rom Harre's Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat (Oxford University Press) covers some of his experiments.

Daniel Todes' Biography of Pavlov presents some of the material as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com