The first year of psychology was heavy with Pavlov's legacies. It was grounded in general biology, physiology, and anatomy, even before we moved to the physiology and anatomy of the brain and higher nervous functions. Some things I saw as superfluous but harmless, like anthropology. Practical biology, on the other hand, I found both unnecessary and unpleasant. I could not skin the obligatory frog and asked a fellow student to do it for me, turning my back while the deed was done. I still don't understand why we had to do this. My impression was that the department was simply looking for things to fill out the curriculum. Psychology was as yet novel in the country; significantly, it was only a sub–department of the Faculty of Philosophy, and so the top heads were still experimenting. Also, there being no Freudian or any of the other psychodynamic approaches—frowned upon, considered “bourgeois pseudo–theories”—a lot of free time needed to be taken care of. All of a sudden an exam in electricity had been introduced, administered by the Physics Department. Having had a rigorous training in the subject at school, I didn't have any problems with this, but for many of my fellow students it was like a thunderclap; they burned the midnight oil and some managed to pass it only on the third attempt. Later we had to do the theory of probability, handled by the Mech & Math Faculty, and apparently on their lofty mathematical level. For many, unsurprisingly, it was the most difficult exam of all. In a “normal” psychology department one only had to do a purely practical course in applied statistics, without any of the supernal theoretical trappings of higher mathematics, as I was to discover when I went on to study in an Israeli university. I forgive the Moscow savants for their quasi–sadistic cluelessness in respect of us the students, but I still bear a grudge about those frogs they made us skin.

Familiarizing ourselves with the human brain was at least the “real” thing, although I found it difficult to hold one, whether whole or cut through the middle, with its terrible odor of formaldehyde, and wonder what sort of person it had belonged to.