Of animals and men: contrasting approaches to the study of animal behavior disorders in America (1930-1950)

Starting from the studies of H. S. Liddell, the experiments on behavior disorders in animals encouraged a great deal of interest during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s in the United States. Even though these studies were mainly carried out with non-human animals, the awarding of prestigious scienti@c prizes to some of these investigations paved the way to the conviction that the laboratory revolution would reach to Psychopathology. In this paper, we will explore the contrasting approaches to the study of abnormal behavior in animals carried out by H. S. Liddell, W. H. Gantt, Norman R. Maier, and Jules Masserman. In order to understand the signi@cance of these research programs, we will focus our analysis not only in the divergent methodologies and theoretical constructs proposed to explain these phenomena, but also in some of the convergent arguments used to justify the relevance of these animal studies for the understanding of human psychopathology –i.e. the observed similarity between the symptoms of the experimental animals and the human patients, with special reference to the symptoms observed in the psychiatric casualties during the World War II.