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THESUICIDALANIMAL:SCIENCEAND
THE NATURE OF SELF-DESTRUCTION
*
I
INTRODUCTION
In 1897, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim published
Suicide, his renowned statistical study that sought to categorize
the varying forms of self-destruction as egoistic, fatalistic, anomic
or altruistic. Durkheim built upon the work of the English jurist
William Wynn Westcott and the Italian psychiatrist Enrico
Morselli, who both perceived suicide as a social phenomenon.
Although he did not dispute that the vast majority of suicides
(barring neurasthenics) intentionally took their own lives,
Durkheim argued their actions should be properly regarded as
‘confirmation of a resolve previously formed for reasons unknown
to consciousness’.
1
The stability of suicide rates, he concluded,
demonstrated the ‘existence of collective tendencies exterior to
the individual’.
2
For the historian Olive Anderson, Suicide is
thus emblematic of the fin de sie
`
cle view that suicide was a social
problem — marking a crucial break from the Romantic belief that
it was a supremely individualistic act.
3
Stephen Turner, mean-
while, portrays Durkheim as the ‘prodigal child’ of nineteenth-
century positivism, in that he believed statistics could illuminate
*Edmund Ramsden’s research for this article was carried out with the support of
the Wellcome Trust, first through a project on the history of stress at the Centre for
Medical History, University of Exeter, directed by Mark Jackson and Jo Melling, and
then at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM),
University of Manchester, as part of a project on the history of the dog in science and
medicine, directed by Michael Worboys. Duncan Wilson would like to thank col-
leagues at CHSTM, particularly John Pickstone and Michael Worboys, for their
advice and encouragement with the article.
1
Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and
George Simpson (London, 2002), 262. Although Morselli served as an important
influence on Durkheim, historians have tended to neglect his work. One notable ex-
ception is Ty Geltmaker, Tired of Living: Suicide in Italy from National Unification to
World War I, 1860–1915 (New York, 2002).
2
Durkheim, Suicide, 283.
3
Olive Anderson, Suicide in Victor ian and Edwardian England (Oxford, 1987).
Past and Present, no. 224 (August 2014) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2014
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the ‘underlying causal order that determined human actions’.
4
And Daryl Lee has shown how Durkheim believed that this
approach would elucidate the ‘deep disturbance from which
civilized societies are suffering’ and, in so doing, advance
sociology as the pre-eminent means of diagnosing the various
ills that plagued modernity.
5
But for all the justifiable attention Durkheim’s work has
received, these historians have overlooked one striking aspect of
Suicide. At the book’s outset, Durkheim defined suicide as ‘all
cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or
negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce
this result’.
6
He then outlined precisely why this definition ‘ex-
cludes from our study everything related to the suicide of ani-
mals’.
7
Contemporary knowledge of the animal mind, Durkheim
argued, ‘does not really attribute to them an understanding antici-
patory of their death nor, especially, of the means to accomplish
it’. Instances where animals seemingly killed themselves, he
continued,
may be quite differently explained. If the irritated scorpion pierces itself
with its sting (which is not at all certain) it is probably from an automatic,
unreflecting reaction. The motive energy caused by his irritation is
discharged by chance and at random; the creature happens to become
its victim, though it cannot be said to have had a preconception of the
result of its action.
8
Similarly, Durkheim stated that if dogs starved to death after
the loss of their masters, ‘it is because the sadness into which they
are thrown has automatically caused lack of hunger; death has
resulted, but without having been foreseen’. Since neither the
scorpion nor the dog used self-injury or fasting ‘as a means to a
known effect’, he concluded, ‘the special characteristics of suicide
as defined by us are lacking’.
9
Durkheim’s refutation of the suicidal animal may seem to us
straightforward. Yet why did he even engage with the issue, if
4
Stephen Turner, ‘Durkheim among the Statisticians’, Journal of the History of the
Behavioral Sciences, xxxii (1996), 357.
5
Daryl Lee, ‘Accounting for Suicide: Morselli, Moral Statistics and the Modernity
of Suicide’, Intellectual History Review, xix (2009), 337.
6
Durkheim, Suicide, xlii. Durkheim defined ‘negative’ acts as the intentional refusal
to eat or drink, which he believed were ‘as suicidal as self-destruction by dagger or
firearm’.
7
Ibid., xlii.
8
Ibid., xliii.
9
Ibid.
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only to dismiss it? Answering this question draws our attention to a
hitherto neglected aspect of the history of suicide. While it may
seem obvious to many that suicide is a uniquely human act, this
belief has a history; and it is a history built upon reflections on the
natural world. In order to present suicide as uniquely human,
Durkheim had to discuss the seemingly deficient animal mind. In
doing so, he engaged in a rhetorical ploy common to many treatises
on suicide, which elevate humans above animals on account of their
ability consciously to reflect upon life and death, and then choose
self-destruction.
For Albert Camus, like Durkheim, anguishing over whether or
not to end one’s life was precisely what set humanity apart from the
natural world. ‘Were I a cat among cats’, Camus stated in 1942, ‘this
problem would not arise, for I would belong to this world. I should be
in this world to which I am now opposed by my whole conscious-
ness’.
10
This, then, is a world view dependent on that which it seeks
to exclude, and we are reminded of Jacques Derrida’s notion of
the supplement: where something apparently ephemeral, on the
fringes of a subject, is actually fundamental to it.
11
And it bears
out Erica Fudge’s claim that the qualities used to define the
human — such as speech, rational thought or suicide — can only
be rendered meaningful through reference to animals. ‘To explain
the human’, Fudge argues, is ‘to explain the animal; or perhaps that
shouldbereversed:toexplaintheanimalistoexplainthehuman’.
12
Although animals have recently moved to a more central position
in historical work, historians have tended to restrict their attention
to the ways in which reflections on animals have underpinned an
anthropocentric world view. Esther Cohen, Erica Fudge, Keith
Thomas and others have shown how medieval, early modern and
Enlightenment authorities distinguished humans from the natural
10
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London, 2005), 40
(emphasis in original). Indeed, though there is not space to explore it here, reflection
upon animals underpinned the long-standing Christian strictures against suicide. See
Anton J. L. Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity
(London, 1990), xiii.
11
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore, 1997), 144–54.
12
Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early
Modern England (Ithaca, 2006), 6. See also Erica Fudge, ‘A Left-Handed Blow:
Writing the History of Animals’, in Nigel Rothfels (ed.), Representing Animals
(Indianapolis, 2000).
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world by representing animals as insensate and irrational.
13
While
this would appear to be the case with Suicide,itisbynomeansthe
whole story. By arguing that animals did not intentionally kill them-
selves, Durkheim was not simply establishing the boundaries of his
inquiry. He was also seeking to refute contemporary writers who
problematized the anthropocentric world view by arguing that
animals did commit suic ide. Charting these arguments in favour of
the existence of animal suicide, we believe, provides a window onto
a most enduring and potent challenge to human exceptionalism.
In this article, we first outline how support for belief in animal
suicide reflected, and linked, social and scientific concerns during
the late nineteenth century. Advocates included anti-cruelty
campaigners and medical reformers, who sought to inculcate sym-
pathy for both man and beast, and supporters of evolution by
common descent, who endorsed continuity between the animal
and human minds. We show how these writers, who included
psychiatrists and psychologists, claimed that animals and humans
both possessed the ability to consciously plan and execute their own
deaths. These accounts, we argue, reflected both the Romantic
view that suicide was a rational and individualistic act and, slightly
later, the medical belief that it stemmed from ‘temporary insanity’.
We then show how there was a shift in focus from the late nineteenth
century onwards. Here, attention turned to accounts of mass
animal suicide, betraying a growing belief that the fin de sie
`
cle
period was marked by a ‘universal wish not to live’, in which
human self-destruction was a trend, process or ‘disease of civiliza-
tion’.
14
Within this shift, the archetype of animal suicide was trans-
posed from the romanticized or insane individual to the anomic
population. As a consequence, the endangered scorpion and griev-
ing dog discussed in Suicide were usurped by the twentieth century’s
emblematic animal suicide: the lemming.
We will examine how a shift from suicide viewed as an individual
and intentional act, to a complex of self-destructive behaviours
determined by various social and biological forces, was influenced
by the growing importance of the animal laboratory to the study of
population dynamics and psychopathology. While attempts to
13
Esther Cohen, ‘Law, Folklore and Animal Lore’, Past and Present, no.110 (Feb.
1986); Fudge, Brutal Reasoning ; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing
Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1987).
14
Barbara T. Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton,
1988).
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induce suicide in laboratory animals in the nineteenth century
were used to dismiss anthropomorphic anecdotes about animals
dying in defiance, anger or grief, laboratory studies promoted the
understanding of behaviour in terms of mechanical and physio-
logical responses to stimuli. By the mid twentieth century, a zoo-
morphic perspective had not only become paradigmatic in fields
that investigated the animal mind and behaviour, such as psych-
ology, but also influenced work in psychiatry and population
studies. Scholars in these fields now interpreted self-destructive
behaviour, in humans and animals, in terms of innate and uncon-
scious responses to social and ecological pressures.
In our final section, we explore how the ecological study
of lemming behaviour dovetailed with an emergent field of
experimental psychiatry, which sought to provide the study of
psychopathology with a rigorous scientific basis. Together, they
promoted stress models of suicide among humans and animals. It
was through the concept of stress, we argue, that long-standing
divisions were overcome and tensions resolved: between the
individual and the collective, intention and automation, and
instincts of self-destruction and self-preservation.
II
FROM ANECDOTE TO EXPERIMENT: THE SCIENCE OF ANIMAL
SUICIDE IN THE 1870S AND 1880S
Discussion of animal self-destruction during the early nineteenth
century was structured by, and perpetuated, the Romantic
view that suicide was a rational and even noble escape from
intolerable circumstances. Popular accounts generally concerned
animals that intentionally ended their lives to escape hopeless
danger or human mistreatment. Prominent among these was the
scorpion, which, when ringed with fire and faced with no means of
escape, was said to kill itself by thrusting its sting into its own back.
Although scorpion suicide had long featured in Iberian folklore, it
was popularized by George Byron’s 1813 poem The Giaour.Like
other Romantics, Byron portrayed suicide as a natural and heroic
act, and regularly asserted his kinship with animals.
15
In The
Giaour , he framed scorpion suicide as a perfect analogy for the
inner torment of the human condition. ‘The mind that broods
15
Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 67.
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o’er guilty woes’, he wrote, ‘Is like the scorpion girt by fire’. With
clear human inference, he outlined how endangered scorpions in-
tentionally chose self-destruction:
In circle narrowing as it glows
The flames around their captive close,
Till inly search’d by thousand throes,
And maddening in her ire,
One sad and sole relief she knows,
The sting she nourished for her foes,
Whose venom never yet was vain
Gives but one pang and cures all pain,
And darts into her desperate brain. —
So do the dark in soul expire
Or live like the scorpion girt by fire.
16
Byron’s ‘scorpion girt by fire’ would later become the first
experimental model for animal suicide, and was eventually used
to refute Romantic and anthropomorphic perspectives on self-
destruction. But the scorpion was by no means the only suicidal
animal to feature in popular debates during the nineteenth century.
As Keith Thomas and Kathleen Kete have both detailed, increas-
ing pet ownership and domestication of working animals fostered
many popular accounts of animal intelligence, or ‘sagacity’.
17
Newspaper accounts of animal suicide formed a small but striking
group of these reports, generally appearing in the provincial press
or in the country section of metropolitan newspapers. In 1845, for
example, The Satirist reported that a ‘fine’ Newfoundland dog had
recently committed suicide in Holmfirth, Yorkshire, by drowning
itself in a river. The report outlined how each time the dog was
‘repeatedly dragged out, it was no sooner released than it again
rushed in, and at last determinedly held its head under water until
life was extinct’.
18
When the naturalist Edward Jesse detailed this
incident in an 1858 edition of his Anecdotes of Dogs,henotably
stressed that the suicide, with its planning and ‘repeated efforts’,
offered definitive ‘proof of the general instinct and sagacity of the
canine race’.
19
16
Lord Byron, The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale, 9th edn (London, 1814).
17
Kathleen Kete, The Beast and the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris
(Berkeley, 1994); Thomas, Man and the Natural World.
18
Anon, ‘A Provincial Paper Mentions that a Fine Dog of the Newfoundland Breed
Committed Suicide, the Other Day, by Drowning’, The Satirist; or, the Censor of the
Times, 2 February 1845, 35.
19
Edward Jesse, Anecdotes of Dogs (London, 1858), 145.
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Neither The Satirist nor Jesse provided any mention of motive
for this dog’s apparent suicide. But this was not the case with the
growing number of reports that circulated during the 1870s and
1880s. These brought together a number of concerns in late
nineteenth-century Britain. They reflected, on the one hand,
the efforts of anti-cruelty campaigners who sought to improve
human behaviour towards animals by showing that humans and
animals possessed similar emotional and intellectual capacities.
In its regular journal The Animal World, the Royal Society for the
Protection of Animals (RSPCA) echoed The Giaour and earlier
newspaper reports by presenting animal suicide as an individual
and ‘deliberate act of will’.
20
Its reports generally involved dogs,
believed to be the most sagacious and affectionate animals, which
were ‘driven to this climax of despair’ following neglect, physical
mistreatment, the death of their master, or even a sharp rebuke.
21
But suicide was by no means considered the preserve of dogs
and scorpions. In 1875, The Animal World reported a case of stag
suicide on the south coast, with an accompanying illustration
(see Plate 1), and criticized the presentation of blood sports as a
noble pastime that was enjoyed equally by the hunting dogs and
their quarry. ‘It is notable’, an editorial claimed, ‘that a wild stag,
rather than be overtaken by its pursuers, will fall into the jaws of
an awful death’.
22
Once again, suicide was presented here as the
last desperate act of a ‘notable and proud animal of high virtues
and merits’. Cornered by ferocious dogs, the stag chose its fate.
Like the endangered scorpion and the mistreated dog, it was
‘driven to desperation’.
These anti-cruelty reports on intelligent and noble animals
often cited scientific accounts of the apparent continuity between
the animal and human mind (which themselves sometimes relied
on popular reports of animal sagacity). The most famous example
is Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, published in 1871, which
argued that mind was subject to processes of evolution by natural
selection, and there was therefore ‘no fundamental difference
between man and animal in their mental faculties’. Any
difference, Darwin concluded, was simply ‘one of degree and
20
Anon, ‘Remarkable Case of Suicide in a Dog’, The Animal World, iii (1871), 91.
21
Ibid. For more on the RSPCA and nineteenth-century anti-cruelty campaigns,
see Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian
Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
22
Anon, ‘Stag Hunting’, The Animal World, 6 (1875), 2.
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not of kind’.
23
Indeed, in 1872, Francis Power Cobbe, the noted
feminist, anti-vivisectionist and editor of The Animal World, wrote
to Darwin claiming that reports of dog suicide offered striking
evidence for mental continuity.
24
Darwin did not respond to Cobbe’s letter and did not write
directly on animal suicide, but his support for mental continuity
drew on the strongest advocate of the reality of animal suicide in
this period, the Scottish psychiatrist William Lauder Lindsay,
superintendent of Murray’s Royal Asylum in Perthshire. When
detailing links between the mental faculties of humans and
animals in The Descent of Man, Darwin cited two articles that
Lindsay had recently published in the Journal of Mental Science.
Here, Lindsay claimed that instances of animal suicide demon-
strated how ‘animals possess mind of the same nature as man;
that there is no mental attribute peculiarly or characteristically
human; and that there is, therefore, no mental distinction
between man and other animals’.
25
Lindsay provided a link between advocates of mental evolution
and anti-cruelty campaigners. His support for mental continuity
was motivated by a clear desire to inculcate greater sympathy for
animals: to show that ‘if a dog or horse is not a man, he is at
all events, in certain respects, a brother’.
26
Lindsay was publicly
renowned as a ‘sound and progressive alienist’, who rejected
mechanical restraint of asylum patients, and he regularly
appeared to extend into the animal kingdom the ethos of ‘moral
management’ that was sweeping through the psychiatric
profession in this period.
27
Indeed, using the language of the in-
fluential reformist John Conolly, Lindsay claimed that human
23
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London,
2004), 151.
24
Francis Power Cobbe to Charles Darwin, 25 December 1872: Archives and
Manuscripts, University of Cambridge, DAR 161:189.
25
W. Lauder Lindsay, ‘Physiology of Mind in the Lower Animals’, Journal of Mental
Science, xvii (1871), 79 (emphasis in original).
26
Ibid., 76 (emphasis in original).
27
Anon., ‘Obituary: William Lauder Lindsay’, British Journal of Psychiatry, xxvi
(1881), 643. On John Conolly’s contributions to psychiatric and asylum reform, see
Andrew Scull, ‘A Victorian Alienist: John Conolly, FRCP, DCL (1794–1866)’, in
W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness:
Essays in the History of Psychiatry,i,People and Ideas (London, 1985). Despite his
public association with the reforming ideals of Conolly, Lindsay nevertheless believed
that mechanical restraint was sometimes necessary for the protection of both patient
and staff. See W. Lauder Lindsay, ‘The Protection Bed and Its Uses’, Edinburgh
Medical Journal, xxiii (1878).
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and animal suicide was ‘not the simple product of malady, but of
malady aggravated by mismanagement’. Drawing from Conolly’s
critique of forcible confinement, and extrapolating across
species, he claimed that ‘when the law of kindness dictates
man’s treatment of fellow animals — as it now regulates the man-
agement of his insane fellow man — destructive violence at least,
and perhaps also suicidal despondency, will doubtless become
less frequent’.
28
At the same time, Lindsay also drew on the work of other
nineteenth-century psychiatrists, who problematized the
Romantic belief that suicide was a largely rational act in order
to portray it more as a medical than a legal or moral problem.
29
Figures such as James Cowles Prichard and, later, Henry
Maudsley claimed that while victims of suicide intentionally
killed themselves, their motivations were largely irrational and
caused by ‘insane impulses’ that resulted from grief, jealousy,
depression, physical illness or hereditary factors. Lindsay, too,
presented animal suicide as predominantly caused by an ‘acute
mania’ that stemmed from mistreatment, grief,jealousy,fear, cap-
tivity, ennui, old age, physical illness or brain disease.
30
But framing
suicide as the result of ‘acute mania’ did not diminish claims for
animal intelligence. Lindsay firmly believed that while acute
mania underpinned suicidal impulses by impairing the ‘instinct-
ive love of life’ and attachment to others, the act itself remained
‘deliberate and intentional, the result of choice and consider-
ation’.
31
He regularly argued that suicidal animals, like people,
displayed ‘the higher efforts of intellect’ in their often repeated
attempts at suicide, comprehending clearly ‘the relation of cause
and effect [and] the possibility of producing a certain end by
the use of given means’.
32
28
W. Lauder Lindsay, ‘Madness in Animals’, Journal of Mental Science, xxiii (1871),
195 (emphasis in original).
29
See Barbara T. Gates, ‘Suicide and the Victorian Physicians’, Journal of the
History of the Behavioral Sciences, xvi (1980).
30
Lindsay, ‘Madness in Animals’, 185 (emphasis in original). See also W. Lauder
Lindsay, Physiology and Pathology of Mind in the Lower Animals (Edinburgh, 1871),
12–14.
31
W. Lauder Lindsay, Mind in the Lower Animals in Health and Disease, ii, Mind in
Disease (London, 1879), 130 (emphasis in original). See also Lindsay, Physiology and
Pathology of Mind in the Lower Animals,2.
32
Lindsay, Physiology and Pathology of Mind in the Lower Animals, 12.
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This latter claim was firmly rejected by Maudsley, who was
widely regarded as Britain’s most influential psychiatrist during
the late nineteenth century.
33
In addition to achieving renown for
developing Prichard’s ideas on ‘insane impulses’ during the
1870s, Maudsley had also written on the mental capacities of
animals in two 1862 articles on ‘The Genesis of Mind’.
34
In con-
trast to Lindsay and others, however, Maudsley in these articles
dwelt on the mental limitations of animals. Maudsley argued that,
while ‘higher’ animals such as dogs exhibited ‘kindly feeling and
active sympathy’, they only possessed a rudimentary intelligence
comparable to that of very small children or ‘congenital idiots’,
and certainly far inferior to ‘ordinary human intelligence’.
35
Maudsley applied these arguments directly to animal suicide in
1879, when he wrote an article in Mind dismissing reports that a
sick dog had deliberately drowned itself. ‘It is quite possible’, he
argued, ‘that an animal in a state of excitement or delirium from
pain and illness may make a frantic rush that issues in its death,
just as a human being may do; but this is quite a different thing to a
distinctly conceived and deliberately perpetuated suicide’.
36
Maudsley claimed that Lindsay and other believers in animal
suicide were too uncritical of the correspondents and popular
stories on which they based their conclusions, and had not
‘taken every pains to avoid the common fallacies of observation
and inference’.
37
He repeated these criticisms in an 1880 review
of Lindsay’s two-volume Mind in the Lower Animals in Health and
Disease, again claiming that Lindsay’s love of animals led him
to assess uncritically sources of ‘dubious value’, so that ‘veracity
seems to have been sacrificed, in some cases, to a spirit of
romance’.
38
Maudsley reiterated that while ‘insane impulses’
may well be shared across species, non-human animals lacked
33
On Maudsley’s influence, see Gates, ‘Suicide and the Victorian Physicians’,
169–70.
34
Henry Maudsley, ‘The Genesis of Mind’, Journal of Mental Science, vii (1862);
Henry Maudsley, ‘The Genesis of Mind [continuation]’, Journal of Mental Science, viii
(1862).
35
Maudsley, ‘Genesis of Mind [continuation]’, 73, 84.
36
Henry Maudsley, ‘Alleged Suicide of a Dog’, Mind, iv (1879), 413.
37
Ibid., 411.
38
Anon, ‘Mind in the Lower Animals, by W. Lauder Lindsay, M.D.’, Journal of
Mental Science, xxvi (1880), 280. This anonymous review is highly likely to have
been written by Maudsley, who reviewed many books for the Journal of Mental
Science, since it repeats many of the arguments made in his articles on ‘The Genesis
of Mind’ and ‘Alleged Suicide of a Dog’.
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the mental ability to foresee that certain acts would result in self-
destruction. He believed a more rigorous author than Lindsay
would have instead listed supposed cases of deliberate animal
suicide as accidental deaths owing to panic, fright or illness.
39
‘Suicide should hardly be considered as such’, he stated, ‘unless
the animal has a distinct knowledge of death, and few animals
indeed have a knowledge that death will follow certain actions,
and will follow such actions to attain their end’.
40
But by the time he wrote Mind in the Lower Animals , Lindsay
was distancing himself from anecdotal and popular reports,
which he admitted often ‘did not bear, or appear to bear, the
stamp of truthfulness or authenticity’.
41
He instead spent much
of the two volumes arguing that better treatment for animals
could only be secured through ‘dispassionate study’ of their
mental endowments, and called for ‘comparative psychology’ to
be established as a scientific field.
42
Like contemporary figures
such as Thomas Henry Huxley and Michael Foster, he believed
that this should be founded on laboratory investigation, and that
there was ‘no reason why the principle of experiment should not be
applied to the investigation of the phenomena of Mind in the
lower animals’.
43
Lindsay believed that experimental work was
crucial to ensuring better treatment for animals, by helping to
dismantle ‘arbitrary and mischievous distinctions’ and engender-
ing sympathy for creatures ‘to whom the application of the words
humanity or intellectuality might be more fitly made’.
44
Like Foster and Huxley, Lindsay also stressed that experiments
would lead to a better understanding of human diseases, and then
to therapies. He claimed that ‘experimental investigation on the
lower animals has already been productive of contributions of
39
In line with the prevailing belief that suicidal acts necessitated the mental aware-
ness of death, and the ability to foresee and carry out a plan, many writers believed
that deliberate suicide was extremely rare among groups with ‘inferior’ mental cap-
abilities such as young children, the mentally ill and ‘primitive peoples’. See, for
example, Henry Morselli, Suicide: an Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (London,
1883), 205.
40
Anon, ‘Mind in the Lower Animals’, 280.
41
W. Lauder Lindsay, Mind in the Lower Animals in Health and Disease,i,Mind in
Health (London, 1879), 18.
42
Ibid., xiii.
43
Ibid., 26. On the growth of the experimental ethos in nineteenth-century biology,
see Gerald L. Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: the
Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society (Princeton, 1978).
44
Lindsay, Mind in the Lower Animals in Health and Disease, i, 25–6.
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the highest value to our knowledge of diseased or disordered
function in Man’, and continued that further work ‘cannot fail
to yield fruits of the most important kind alike to veterinary and
medical science’.
45
To Lindsay, the growing belief in the
evolution of mental capabilities meant that psychological states
in humans could never be fully understood without recourse to
animals, and it ‘will only be when mind is studied in its most
comprehensive aspect — not as confined to man, but as exhibited
by the whole animal series, from its small beginnings to its highest
development — that the necessary data will be collected for
classifying in the spirit of modern science’.
46
Lindsay devoted a whole chapter of Mind in the Lower Animals
to outlining how ‘comparative psychology’ should be founded
on ‘study by observation and experiment’.
47
He argued the
comparative psychologist should undertake experiments to ‘de-
termine the true nature, relations and range’ of animal behaviour,
under controlled and replicable conditions that ensured findings
could not simply be dismissed as ‘inferences or opinions’.
48
Most of
the experiments Lindsay proposed involved prompting specific
behaviour through actions and verbal cues, or watching how
animals used tools to solve certain problems. However, he also
detailed other experiments that were ‘cruel’ and should not be
unnecessarily repeated, even though they might be useful for
investigating animal intelligence. These included deception,
such as replacing an animal’s eggs with stones, destroying nests
and habitat, removing portions of the brain by vivisection, and
encouraging ‘self-destruction’ in captive or distressed animals.
49
Lindsay argued that these latter experiments were unnecessary
since several investigators had already proved that animals ‘delib-
erately commit suicide’.
50
To illustrate, he cited several cases in
which researchers undertook experiments on animals to assess if,
and under what conditions, they attempted suicide. Their animal of
choice, the scorpion, reflected the continuing fascination with what
the biologist Alfred Bourne called ‘the phenomena so graphically
45
Ibid., 26.
46
Ibid., 32.
47
Ibid., 29–36.
48
Ibid., 30 (emphasis in original).
49
Ibid., 34–5.
50
Ibid., 57.
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delineated by Byron’.
51
In 1874, in an experiment that Lindsay
recounted at length, one correspondent of Nature recounted how
he had used a botanical lens to focus sunlight on a scorpion kept in a
glass case, whereupon it ‘began to run hurriedly about the case,
hissing and spitting in a fierce way’.
52
During the fifth attempt of this
experiment, when the scorpion apparently realized resistance was
futile, it ‘turned up its tail and plunged the sting, quick as lightning,
into its own back . . . sure enough in less than a minute life was quite
extinct’.
53
Writing to Nature in 1879, the Glasgow anatomist Allen
Thomson claimed to have successfully replicated this experiment.
‘The effect of light’, he stated, produced ‘excitement amounting to
despair, which causes the animal to kill itself ’.
54
Others contradicted Lindsay and called for more of these ex-
periments, in order to shed greater light on the causes of suicide
and the capacities of the animal mind. These included the jurist
Wynn Westcott, who joined several writers in the 1870s and
1880s to argue that suicide should be perceived as a social and
biological phenomenon which affected a growing proportion of
the population and should be diagnosed and treated through
medical and public policy.
55
While he had dedicated himself
to charting the statistical incidence of suicide among human
populations, Westcott believed that animal experiments might
prove critical in isolating causal factors. In his influential 1885
book, Suicide: Its History, Literature, Jurisprudence, Causation and
Prevention, Westcott dedicated a whole chapter to animal suicide.
He argued here that if experiments could be used to prove that
animals did ‘kill themselves with the intention of ending their own
lives’, it would have profound implications for the perception of
suicide as caused by ‘heart-breaking grief of mind, or intolerable
pain of body’.
56
He then listed a number of favourable examples,
including scorpion experiments, yet claimed that more work was
needed to ‘close the controversy as to whether animals ever do, or
do not commit suicide’.
57
51
Alfred G. Bourne, ‘The Reputed Suicide of Scorpions’, Proceedings of the Royal
Society of London, xlii (1887), 18.
52
G. Bidie, ‘Suicide of a Scorpion’, Nature, ix (1874), 29 (emphasis in original).
53
Ibid.
54
Allen Thomson, ‘Suicide of the Scorpion’, Nature, xx (1879), 577.
55
Gates, Victorian Suicide; Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England.
56
William Wynn Westcott, Suicide: Its History, Literature, Jurisprudence, Causation
and Prevention (London, 1885), 176, A2.
57
Ibid., 176.
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Westcott’s calls for more research were echoed by the compara-
tive psychologist George Romanes, whose 1882 book Animal
Intelligence was, like Mind in the Lower Animals, a compendium
of stories highlighting the mental capabilities of many animals,
with a view to establishing general principles for a theory of
mental evolution.
58
Although Romanes considered accounts
of self-stinging scorpions to be ‘remarkable’, his belief that
comparative psychology should have a firm empirical basis led
him to demand even ‘further corroboration before we should be
justified in accepting [them] unreservedly’.
59
The call for ‘corroboration’ was answered the following year,
when the experimental psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan, then
living in South Africa, submitted a long letter to Nature detailing
his own experiments on scorpions. Morgan had learnt labora-
tory methods at Huxley’s Royal School of Mines, in South
Kensington, during the late 1870s. In addition to Huxley’s
belief that biology could only be advanced through experimenta-
tion, Morgan also inherited his former tutor’s interest in the
relation between consciousness and physical processes, and his
disdain for the anthropomorphism of figures such as Romanes.
60
As his letter to Nature made clear, Morgan shared Huxley’s belief
that animal behaviour, including behaviour that was supposedly
the result of conscious thought, should instead be explained
in terms of simple reflexes.
61
Morgan recounted how he sought
to prove this by designing a series of experiments ‘sufficiently
barbarous to induce any scorpion with the slightest suicidal ten-
dency to find relief in self-destruction’.
62
These experiments
involved condensing sunbeams on to scorpions’ backs, burning
them with acid and alcohol, surrounding them with fire, heating
them in a bottle, and exposing them to electrical shocks and other
‘general and exasperating sources of worry’.
63
58
Robert Boakes, From Darwin to Behaviourism: Psychology and the Minds of Animals
(Cambridge, 1984), 25–32.
59
George J. Romanes, Animal Intelligence (London, 1882), 225.
60
For more detail, see Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: the Long Debate about
Animal Language (Chicago, 2007), 7; Boakes, From Darwin to Behaviourism, 25–32.
61
Morgan believed that the human mind was fundamentally different from the
animal mind on account of its capacity for abstract thought which, he believed, was
clearly evidenced by language. See Radick, Simian Tongue, 75.
62
C. Lloyd Morgan, ‘Suicide of Scorpions’, Nature, xxvii (1883), 530.
63
Ibid., 313.
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Morgan argued that while scorpions clearly struck at their own
backs, this should be interpreted as an instinctive effort ‘to
remove the source of irritation’, and not as a conscious effort
at suicide.
64
Here, he advanced the argument that formed the
core of his famed ‘canon’ during the 1890s: that objectivity and
anthropomorphism were mutually exclusive, and that no animal
activity should be interpreted as the outcome of a higher mental
faculty if it could be reasonably interpreted as the outcome of one
lower in the psychological scale, such as instinct or trial-and-error
learning.
65
Taking a thinly veiled swipe at the anthropomorphic
work of Romanes, Lindsay and others, Morgan concluded that
instinctive actions of the scorpion had previously been ‘put down
by those not accustomed to accurate observation as attempts at
self-destruction’.
66
As we have seen, this argument had previously been made by
Henry Maudsley, who claimed that an individual ‘sees only in
any matter that which he brings with him the faculty to see’, and
ventured that untrained observers and animal-lovers were misin-
terpreting accidental deaths as evidence of deliberate suicide.
67
We
should note, however, that Maudsley and Morgan had differing
reasons for rejecting animal suicide. Maudsley’s stance reflected
the views laid out in his work on ‘The Genesis of Mind’, where
he sought to reassert an anthropocentric world view in the face of
growing claims for animal intelligence. Throughout these articles,
Maudsley regularly asserted that the ‘civilisation of today is greatly
superior, in its practical morality, to the moral condition of the
world at any other period’. As such, he refused to countenance
that the minds of ‘cultivated’ human races were in any way com-
parable to those of lower animals.
68
In doing so, Maudsley also
portrayed the human mind as the only appropriate object of
study for psychiatrists: since it was ‘so far exalted in its development
above the animal mind’ and was ‘subject to the possibility of much
greater degradation’. To Maudsley, ‘even the madness of man,
then, declares his superiority’.
69
64
Ibid.
65
Radick, Simian Tongue, 51.
66
Ibid.
67
Maudsley, ‘Genesis of Mind’, 483.
68
Ibid., 97.
69
Ibid., 88.
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Morgan’s dismissal of animal suicide, meanwhile, reflected
the late nineteenth-century belief that cautious and detached
readings of natural phenomena were crucial to the construction of
a ‘scientific self’. As Greg Radick has shown, for a new generation
of researchers seeking to establish comparative psychology as a
respectable academic discipline, Morgan’s firm anti-anthropo-
morphic stance served as a badge of professionalism.
70
In psych-
ology and other disciplines, rejecting conscious thought in favour
of automatic response separated the objective scientists from their
subjects, and transformed the animal into a predictable and pro-
ductive experimental tool.
71
This professionalizing tactic helped
displace the belief that animals could consciously end their own
lives with the view that they were driven by the instinct of self-
preservation. It was man’s capacity to overcome this instinct that
separated him from the animal world.
III
SUICIDE, MODERNITY AND THE LEMMING
From the late nineteenth century there emerged two general, and
largely antithetical, approaches to the study of human suicide that
would dominate the field into the mid twentieth century. The first
was the sociological or ecological, focused on identifying patterns
in the statistics of reported suicides in the general population and
linking them to factors such as population density, and social iso-
lation and mobility. The second, most prominent among psych-
iatrists and psychologists, was focused on case histories, seeking
to understand the precipitating, and often unconscious, factors
that drove an individual to commit a self-destructive act. While
animals were generally perceived as driven by the instincts of self-
preservation, as we shall see, ideas of natural laws and inherent
drives determining processes of self-destruction did leave space
for the consideration of animal suicide. Further, with an increasing
focus on the collective and unconscious elements of suicidal
behaviour, attention turned to animals that were unwittingly
driven to destruction: to shoals of fish dashing themselves on
70
Radick, Simian Tongue, 207–11.
71
See Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov’s Physiological Factory: Exper iment, Interpretation,
Laboratory Enterprise (Baltimore, 2002); Eileen Crist, Images of Animals:
Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia, 1999).
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boat hulls, whales beaching themselves on the shore, or the hordes
of lemmings known periodically to march across the Norwegian
planes to perish in the sea.
The most influential exponent of the first approach was
undoubtedly Durkheim. His analysis of the problem was closely
tied to his struggle with the discipline of psychology and his
promotion of the rules of the sociological method — a naturalistic
methodology that identified ‘realities external to the individual . . .
as definite and substantial as those of the psychologist or biolo-
gist’.
72
In Suicide, a most private and individualistic act was ex-
plained sociologically. He first defined suicide as an act that the
individual knew with certainty to be fatal. He excluded people
with impaired reason and non-human animals, and limited its
frequency in children and primitive populations. In the animal,
any ‘void created by existence’ was purely physical, a matter of
material resources, and when ‘filled, the animal, satisfied, asks
nothing further. Its power of reflection is not sufficiently developed
to imagine other ends than those implicit in its physical nature’.
73
As human needs became less dependent on the physical body, the
less easily were they satisfied. Second, he understood the various
individual motives for suicide as driven, in turn, by broader and
more fundamental social currents. Conscious acts were determined
by unconscious forces to be studied by the sociologist. The
breakdown in traditional forms of social solidarity and the rise of
egoistic individualism were reflected in the rising rates of suicide
in Western nations.
Peter Hamilton identifies Durkheim’s work as steeped in nat-
uralistic metaphors: populations had their own suicide rates,
determined, for Durkheim, by ‘real living active forces’ independ-
ent of the individual.
74
This deterministic tendency was shared by
other contemporary moral statisticians. Durkheim had drawn
heavily on the work of Enrico Morselli, professor of psychological
medicine at the Royal University of Turin and physician-in-chief
to the Royal Asylum for the Insane. For Morselli, like Durkheim,
suicide was a ‘voluntary human act’.
75
And yet, it could only be
understood through the statistical study of the social forces that
72
Durkheim, Suicide, 39.
73
Ibid., 246.
74
Peter Hamilton, ‘Commentary’, in Peter Hamilton (ed.), Emile Durkheim:
Critical Assessments, iii (London, 1989), 4.
75
Morselli, Suicide,1.
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motivated the act: ‘The old philosophy of individualism had given
to suicide the character of liberty and spontaneity, but now it
became necessary to study it no longer as the expression of indi-
vidual and independent faculties, but certainly as a social phe-
nomenon allied with all the other racial forces’.
76
The motives
of the collective outweighed the personal. Morselli argued that
without the aid of statistics, motives were ‘not apparent; there
are other, more secret causes whose existence and influence
elude even the suicide himself, because they act on him uncon-
sciously’.
77
As civilized as human beings had become, they were
still subject to the laws of nature. While the ‘savage’, being closer
to the animal, rarely resorted to suicide unless through fanaticism
or under the ‘stress of hunger’, with increased population density,
urbanization, organization and individualism came new ‘psych-
ical (cerebral) needs’, and increased rates of suicide.
78
Just as
disease, sterility and murder removed the weak among animals
and primitive men, suicide functioned as a ‘tribute’ in advanced
society, removing a certain number of individuals in accordance
with Darwinian and Malthusian principles.
79
S. A. K. Strahan, psychiatrist and fellow of the Royal Statistical
Society and the Medico-Psychological Association, was even
more explicit in interpreting suicide as a process of natural law.
He first posited self-preservation as ‘the first law of nature’.
80
Any
animal in which this instinct was weak or lacking was thereby
unfit, and ‘the creature must go’.
81
The ‘savage’ also, ‘in common
with the wild animals, exists under conditions more or less ap-
proaching the natural’,
82
while the ‘idiot’ rarely committed sui-
cide, being ‘led exactly like the beast of the field’.
83
Strahan drew
upon the work of Morselli and turned to heredity for an explan-
ation for the increase in suicide in civilized nations. While carriers
of suicidal impulses were eradicated in nature, they, like those of
76
Ibid., 3.
77
Ibid., 8.
78
Ibid., 118.
79
Ibid., 364.
80
S. A. K. Strahan, Suicide and Insanity: a Physiological and Sociological Study
(London, 1893), 26.
81
Ibid., 69.
82
Ibid., 68. This association between the savage and the lower animal was common
in discussions of suicide, but did not go unchallenged, particularly by anthropologists
and ethnologists. See S. R. Steinmetz, ‘Suicide among Primitive People’, American
Anthropologist, vii (1894).
83
Strahan, Suicide and Insanity, 102.
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numerous other pathologies and degeneracies, were sustained in
the modern world and allowed to propagate their kind, until ‘an
active, all-consuming desire for death is developed’.
84
John C. Weaver identifies Durkheim, Morselli and Strahan as
leading figures in a group he designates as determinists.
85
The
regularity of suicide statistics and their steady increase in civilized
societies revealed a general law. Suicide was no longer merely an
issue of free will and moral censure; a larger social or natural law
determined that a certain number of individuals would end their
own lives. In the work of Morselli and Strahan, in particular,
human beings were placed within nature, subject to the same
processes of struggle, strife, degeneration and decay that removed
a certain proportion of the population, and yet they were also
differentiated from it through their capacity for self-destruction
that grew with the advance of civilization, serving as the means by
which the human population limited its numbers. For those
focused on linking social and biological laws of population dy-
namics, the fact that suicide rates seemed to increase with popu-
lation size, density and geographic mobility provided a space for
considering more general processes of destructive behaviour
in the natural world.
86
Raymond Pearl, based at Johns Hopkins and considered the
leading population biologist in the United States, was determined
to bring the social and biological sciences together through
statistical study.
87
In order to achieve this he turned to the
lemming, which had become of interest to biologists since
travellers reported their behaviour in the late nineteenth century.
This was because the lemming’s actions seemed so destructive,
challenging, as one writer put it, ‘the whole doctrine of the preser-
vation of the species’.
88
Following an explosion in numbers every
84
Ibid., 69.
85
John C. Weaver, A Sadly Troubled History: the Meanings of Suicide in the Modern
Age (Montreal, 2009), 32–4. We do not mean to suggest that there were not very
significant differences between these approaches. Strahan, for example, believed
that the true suicide was mentally ill, in direct contrast to Durkheim.
86
See, for example, Louis I. Dublin and Bessie Bunzel, To Be or Not to Be: a Study of
Suicide (New York, 1933).
87
On Pearl’s statistical and biological determinism and his vision of an interdiscip-
linary population biology, see Edmund Ramsden, ‘Carving up Population Science:
Eugenics, Demography and the Controversy over the ‘‘Biological Law’’ of Population
Growth’, Social Studies of Science, xxxii (2002).
88
Lawrence G. Green, ‘Science Puzzling Over a New Epidemic of Race Suicide by
Whales’, Albuquerque Journal, 6 Dec. 1936.
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few years, masses of lemmings were seen to travel down from their
mountain homes to the coast.
89
Undeterred by the sea, they swam
out until they drowned, littering the beaches with their corpses.
When marching, they did not seem to move aside for any obstacle,
as if, one writer described, they were ‘impelled by some strange
power’.
90
The lemming was described as indifferent to danger
and death,often responding to approach with rage, frenzied attack
and even a ‘poisonous’ bite.
91
The saying ‘angry as a lemming’
was common in Norway and, no doubt to the consternation
(or amusement) of those visiting Scandinavia in a ‘lemming
year’, the animals were believed to get so enraged they were
liable to ‘explode’.
92
With such associations — of mass move-
ment, aggression and volatility — it is perhaps unsurprising that
military metaphors proved popular; a report by a Mr Brooke in
1823 described their crossing of a body of water in terms of an
‘army’ forming a ‘complete pontoon bridge’.
93
Lauder Lindsey had suggested that the march of the lemming
‘armies’ could be seen in terms of an ‘epidemic morbid impulse,
leading to epidemic suicide’, but admitted that he could not
explain ‘the object or cause’.
94
For Pearl, there was a clear
Malthusian explanation. Lemming population cycles could be
mapped on to the growth and decline of races and civilizations.
A fundamental biological law, he argued, governed both. For
Pearl, the ‘mass suicide’ of the lemming was a particularly
brutal example of the processes by which a species regulated its
numbers to ensure its long-term survival. While he argued in
89
Particularly influential was the work of the Norwegian natural historian Robert
Collett, which was translated into English. See Robert Collett, ‘On Myodes lemmus in
Norway’, The Journal of The Linnean Society, Zoology, xiii (1877); R. Collett, Myodes
lemmus, its Habits and Migrations in Norway (Christiana, 1895).
90
Anon., ‘The Lemming, or Migratory Rat’, The Treasury of Literature and The
Ladies’ Treasury, 1 Nov. 1871.
91
In the 1871 essay, the lemming is described as ‘pre-eminently a devastator . . . An
enemy so numerous and destructive would quickly render the countries they deva-
stated barren’. See Ibid.
92
N. C. Stenseth and R. A. Ims, ‘The History of Lemming Research: from the
Nordic Sagas to The Biology of Lemmings’, in N. C. Stenseth and R. A. Ims (eds.) The
Biology of Lemmings (London, 1993), 21.
93
Brooke was reiterating an eye-witness account from a Mr Knudtzon of
Drontheim. A. de Capell Brooke, ‘Travels through Sweden, Norway, and Finmark
to the North Cape, in the Summer of 1820’, Quarterly Review, xxx (1823), 130.
94
Lindsay, Mind in the Lower Animals, i, 151. See also W. Lauder Lindsay, ‘Mental
Epidemics among Lower Animals’, Journal of Mental Science, xvii (1872).
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1937 that one could not envisage the same ‘watery grave’ for
humanity, he nevertheless believed that humans were being
driven to war, and thus to ‘commit suicide’, by the same funda-
mental biological forces of growth and decline.
95
Pearl’s
Malthusian approach was shared by an emerging discipline of
ecology. Charles Elton ensured that the lemming cycle would
be central to the work of the Animal Population Bureau at
Oxford, the centre of the growing field of animal ecology in
Britain.
96
For Elton, overpopulation itself was the cause of the
lemmings’ migration and their subsequent demise.
97
This he
described as ‘a rather tragic procession of refugees, with all the
obsessed behaviour of the unwanted stranger in a populous land,
going blindly on to various deaths’.
98
Throughout the twentieth century, the lemming increasingly
came to symbolise man’s capacity for self-destruction. Its popu-
larity increased with the destructiveness of the world wars, as
Pearl’s work shows. Particularly prevalent was its use as a
symbol of Nazi Germany’s collective, self-destructive urge for
lebensraum, what Northrop Frye described as Hitler’s ‘lemming
march’.
99
For Sir Lewis Namier, Hitler had made use of the most
fundamental element in politics — the ‘primal horde’ — and
‘there can be no free will in the thinking and actions of the
95
Pearl spoke of the history of humanity presenting ‘objectively a rather remarkable
parallelism to the successive stages (up to the final one) in the history of a lemming
population’, which is, of course, ultimately destructive to large sections of the popu-
lation: Raymond Pearl, ‘On Biological Principles Affecting Populations: Human and
Other’, The American Naturalist, lxxi (1937), 64.
96
Peter Crowcroft, Elton’s Ecologists: A History of the Bureau of Animal Population
(Chicago, 1991), 3.
97
C. S. Elton, ‘Periodic Fluctuations in Numbers of Animals: their Causes and
Effects’, British Journal of Experimental Biology, ii (1924).
98
Charles Elton, Voles, Mice, and Lemmings: Problems in Population Dynamics
(Oxford, 1942), 214. Elton noted how lemming migration had ‘been given a tinge
of epic romance’ by the poets laureate Robert Bridges and John Masefield. Bridges, in
his poem The Testament of Beauty, compared their migration to the second crusade. He
also described the lemming migration as ‘analogous to infanticide among human
beings as a method of preventing overpopulation’ (Elton, ‘Periodic Fluctuations in
Numbers of Animals’, 126). For a historical analysis of the attempts to understand the
lemming cycle, see Stephen Bocking, ‘Science and Spaces in the Northern
Environment’, Environmental History, xii (2007); Dennis Chitty, Do Lemmings
Commit Suicide? Beautiful Hypotheses and Ugly Facts (Oxford, 1996).
99
Northrop Frye, ‘The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler’, Daedalus, ciii
(1974), 9.
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masses, any more than in the revolutions of planets, in the
migrations of birds, and in the plunging of hordes of lemmings
into the sea’.
100
Through the lemming, the human being was
presented as a destructive animal. Yet this was not destruction
motivated by passion; in the words of the psychiatrist Erich
Fromm, it was that of the ‘totally alienated’, the ‘automaton’,
not the ‘destroyer’.
101
Such interpretations were no doubt reinforced by White
Wilderness, a Disney nature documentary from 1958, often mis-
takenly regarded as the source of the lemming suicide myth, in
which a large number of lemmings were forcibly marched to their
deaths in Alberta. The narrator described them as gripped by a
‘compulsion’, an ‘unreasoning hysteria’, as ‘victims of an obses-
sion, a one tracked thought’. The image of thousands of identical
rodents following a ‘leader’ to their destruction was here, per-
haps, associated with the dangers of communism; but it was
just as commonly related to the banality of party politics and
the conformity of consumer culture.
The lemming was, therefore, not an example of an individual
animal wilfully ending its life in defiance, anger or grief, as in the
case of the Romantic scorpion or the Victorian dog; this was a
suicide of the unconscious mind, the machine, the unthinking
mass, species or system. While, in the nineteenth century, suicide
had been a means of attributing emotion, mind, intelligence and
individuality to the animal, in the twentieth century its role was
reversed — a means of questioning the independent intellectual
faculty of the modern human. Indeed, for Fromm: ‘In the
100
Quoted in John Brooke, ‘Namier and Namierism’, History and Theory, iii
(1964). Namier was drawing on Freud’s group psychology and shared his concern
that mass behaviour was a reflection of mankind’s more primitive urges. Sigmund
Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (London,
1959). See Daniel Pick, ‘Freud’s Group Psychology and the History of the Crowd’,
History Workshop Journal, xl (1995).
101
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Harmondsworth, 1977),
462. The case of the lemming seemed relevant to survival after a nuclear attack,
reflecting its application to both aggressor and victim. For Fromm the effects of nu-
clear war would be ‘mass psychosis’ and the re-emergence of ‘a new form of primitive
barbarism, to the resurgence of the most archaic elements, which are still potentialities
in every man and of which we have had ample evidence in the terror systems of Hitler
and Stalin’. Erich Fromm, ‘The Case for Unilateral Disarmament’, Daedalus, lxxxix
(1960), 1018.
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nineteenth century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the twentieth
century it means schizoid self-alienation’.
102
Psychiatrists and psychologists were also much taken by the
lemming as a means of illustrating the alienation of mod-
ern people.
103
For the psychologist and concentration camp
survivor Bruno Bettelheim, the behaviour of the lemming was
not only characterized by aggression, but reflected fatalism:
‘The unique feature of the extermination camps is not that the
Germans exterminated millions of people . . . What was new,
unique, terrifying, was that millions, like lemmings, marched
themselves to their own death. This is what is incredible; this
we must come to understand’.
104
Bettelheim believed that the behaviour of individuals in the
camps had provided him with an understanding of the human
condition in a mass society. With industrialization, urbanization
and depersonalization there emerged ever greater threats to
individual autonomy and ever increasing degrees of alienation.
In the camps, thought and consciousness had been sacrificed for
physical preservation. Individuals ‘stopped acting on their own’,
becoming withdrawn, fatalistic, childlike. Psychic death soon led
to physical death as the individual lost the struggle for life. ‘The
prisoners lived, like children, only in the immediate present; they
lost the feeling for the sequence of time, they became unable to
plan for the future or to give up immediate pleasure satisfactions
to gain greater ones in the near future. They were unable to
establish durable object-relations’.
105
The same processes that reduced humanity to a mass of automa-
tons or ‘walking corpses’, disconnected from the world around
them, Bettelheim found in autism, the disease of civilization
that was to occupy him for the rest of his life. Autism, often defined
102
Erich Fromm, ‘The Present Human Condition’, The American Scholar, xxv
(1955–56), 33.
103
See, for example, Karl Menninger, ‘The Suicidal Intention of Nuclear
Armament’, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, xlvii (1983); Nicholas Humphrey,
Four Minutes to Midnight: the Bronowski Memorial Lecture 1981 (London, 1982);
Hudson Hoagland, ‘Biological Aspects of Aggression and Violence’, Zygon,iv
(1969); Lawrence S. Kubie, ‘The Eagle and the Ostrich’, Archives of General
Psychiatry, v (1961).
104
Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Foreword’, in Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: a Doctor’s
Eyewitness Account, trans. Tibe
`
re Kremer and Richard Seaver (New York, 1960),
vi–vii.
105
Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations’,
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, xxxviii (1943).
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as childhood schizophrenia, was an individual’s response to
feeling totally overpowered. In order to prevent complete anni-
hilation, the individual committed a kind of ‘psychic suicide’,
withdrawing from human contact and existing in a silent, dream-
like state, oblivious to danger yet prone to momentary bouts of
extreme anger.
For Bettelheim, however, the suicidal lemming was a meta-
phor, not an analogy. Indeed, it was the fact that the lemming’s
behaviour seemed so bizarre and incongruous that made it such a
powerful rhetorical tool; not so much a means of uniting human-
ity with the natural world, but dividing them from it. When it
came to studying the actual causes of suicide, psychologists and
psychiatrists were drawn to psychoanalytic techniques, and duly
promoted the individual case history over statistical patterns and
laws of population growth and decline. Two of the leading figures
in the psychoanalytic school of suicidology, Karl A. Menninger
and Gregory Zilboorg, were particularly dismissive of statistical
approaches. Menninger described statistical analyses as ‘barren’,
and his influential book, Man against Himself, had little on social
factors.
106
Zilboorg criticized the methodology of sociologists
and moral statisticians: ‘Statistical data on suicides . . . deserve
little if any credence . . . since all too many suicides are not re-
ported as such’.
107
It was also the case that ‘suicide attempts, no matter how
serious, never find their way into the tables of vital statistics’.
108
Both Menninger and Zilboorg were active in broadening the def-
inition of suicide to encompass the attempted or ‘partial’. This
allowed them to overcome a serious methodological obstacle to
psychoanalytic study. The psychoanalyst relies on a detailed
examination of the individual’s life history. This is, of course,
not possible with the suicide unless the individual also happened
to be under long-term psychiatric examination. It does become
possible, however, if one includes those who attempt, or even
think about, suicide and those who self-harm.
109
The focus was
106
Karl Menninger, ‘Psychoanalytic Aspects of Suicide’, International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, xiv (1933); Karl Menninger, Man against Himself (London, 1938).
107
Gregory Zilboorg, ‘Suicide among Civilized and Primitive Races’, American
Journal of Psychiatry, xcii (1936).
108
Ibid.
109
On this point, see George Simpson, ‘Methodological Problems in Determining
the Aetiology of Suicide’, American Sociological Review, xvi (1950); Lawrence S.
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broadened to address a more general self-destructive impulse,
and Menninger included a range of behaviours within the
category of suicidal behaviour, such as self-starvation, dehydra-
tion and the refusal of medical treatment (organic), accidents,
dangerous sports and smoking (chronic suicide), and self-
mutilation (partial and focal suicide). He drew upon Freud’s
notion of the death instinct or drive, which, in direct contrast to
the pleasure principle, was a conservative force that had evolved
as a means of alleviating tension and coping with trauma — ‘an
urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things’,
110
assuring, ultimately, ‘that the organism shall follow its own path
to death’.
111
For Menninger, this innate, unconscious and
destructive drive was common to all and, when not effectively
balanced by the instinct of self-preservation, and when aggressive
and destructive impulses found no outlet, it underlay a variety
of self-destructive behaviours. Self-harming, or partial suicide,
was, in turn, a final attempt at self-preservation.
112
Recalling
Bettelheim, he argued that localized self-destruction was a
means of averting total suicide. While Menninger did not focus
directly on the possibility of animal suicide, the universality of the
self-destructive drive certainly created a space for its consider-
ation, and his work does contain a number of examples, from
mink chewing off their limbs when trapped and a monkey that
self-mutilated when emotionally conflicted, to helpless rats that
gave up their struggle for life and succumbed to death.
113
Zilboorg, a psychoanalyst based in New York City, chaired a
short-lived Committee for the Study of Suicide, established in
1936. The Committee supported research on suicide among
(n. 109 cont.)
Kubie, ‘Multiple Determinants of Suicide’, in Edwin S. Shneidman (ed.), Essays
in Self-Destruction (New York, 1967).
110
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York,
1959), 308.
111
Ibid., 311.
112
This ranged from the amputation of limbs and sexual organs to hair-pulling and
nail-biting. Karl Menninger, ‘A Psychoanalytic Study of the Significance of Self-
Mutilations’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, iv (1935).
113
Menninger, Man against Himself, 7; Menninger, ‘A Psychoanalytic Study of the
Significance of Self-Mutilations’, 456; Karl Menninger, ‘The Aacdemic Lecture:
Hope’, American Journal of Psychiatry, cxvi (1959).
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children and the ‘primitive races’, such as the Mohave.
114
While
Zilboorg considered the idea of a death instinct to lack explana-
tory power,
115
he similarly described suicide in terms of a biolo-
gical instinct that ‘appears to be a real elemental psychic force,
universal in nature and apparently confined not alone to human
beings’.
116
He outlined some of the various dynamic motivational
factors at work, arguing that ‘. . . suicide is far from being the
monopoly of civilization’.
117
Not only was it as common among
primitive populations, but ‘animals, too — for instance, dogs or
monkeys — on occasion refuse food and die when mistreated’.
118
Zilboorg argued that psychoanalysts needed to understand how
such an instinct could have evolved, and suggested that, just as
the body’s response to physical injury could end in the death of
the organism, when the mind was fearful and frustrated by its in-
ability to master reality it projected fantasies and delusions to the
point that it ‘saved’ itself through the paradoxical self-assertion of
self-imposed death.
119
The idea that suicide involved the exercise
114
‘Notes’ in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vi (1937), 273; vii (1938), 167–8; ix (1940),
160. The committee was originally supported by Marshall Field, a banker, and com-
prised seven psychiatrists and two social workers. It was disbanded with the entry of
the United States into World War II.
115
The death instinct proved Freud’s most controversial hypothesis: ‘the most bi-
zarre monster of all Freud’s gallery of monsters’ according to William McDougall,
quoted in John Flugel, ‘The Death Instinct, Homeostasis and Allied Concepts’,
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Supplement, xxxiv (1953), 43. For Freud’s
critics, the fact that the instinct seemed based in biology, shared by ‘all organic life’,
the lack of evidence of a self-destructive impulse among animals was, they argued,
damning. For Sylvia Payne, the death instinct was ‘difficult for scientists to accept’: ‘If
we turn to biology for evidence, the question arises as to whether we can observe a
death instinct in animals. As a rule animals are aggressive in order to preserve life’.
Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner (eds.), The Freud–Klein Controversies, 1941–45
(London, 1991), 746. Freud did draw on some biological evidence, particularly the
‘unexpected analogy’ with Auguste Weismann’s theory that the body, or soma, was
programmed to die to ensure the immortality of the germ-plasm. See Freud, Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, 81. For criticism of his reliance on Weisman, see C. P. Blacker,
‘Life and Death Instincts’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, ix (1929). In his criti-
cism, Blacker drew on Morgan’s study of the scorpion, and argued that the idea of
lemming suicide would run counter to Darwinian evolution. Blacker did, however,
propose that animals could, like man, die from ‘inanition’ when placed in an unfavour-
able environment, and that suicide itself resulted from the misdirection of useful bio-
logical instincts, such as aggression, but not from a specific ‘death impulse’.
116
Gregory Zilboorg, ‘Considerations on Suicide, with Particular Reference to that
of the Young’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, vii (1937), 22.
117
Ibid., 23.
118
Ibid., 23–4. See also Gregory Zilboorg, ‘Differential Diagnostic Types of
Suicide’, Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, xxxv (1936).
119
Zilboorg, ‘Considerations on Suicide’, 28–9.
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of free will and rationality was, for Zilboorg, ‘medieval’ and left
over from ‘theological age’.
120
It was critical, he argued, to piece
together the various unconscious and instinctive motivations to
classify and formulate a typology of suicidal behaviours.
Thus, in their different ways, the ecological and psychoanalytic
approaches advanced the secular study of suicidal behaviour, one
promoting social and biological factors external to the individual,
and the other, internal and unconscious factors. Both compli-
cated the conception of suicide as an intentional act involving
the exercise of free will and rational motivations. However, as
Zilboorg observed, ‘a truly scientific psychology of suicide is
still wanting’.
121
He believed, as did many by the mid twentieth
century, that scientific progress depended on greater synthesis
between the study of psychological motivations and that of
social conditions.
122
He also pushed for closer relations
between psychoanalysis and the natural sciences, biology in
particular.
123
The stage was set for a reconsideration of the role
of the animal as a means of understanding suicidal behaviour. As
we shall see in the next section, the experimental laboratory was
emerging as an important means of bringing the social and the
psychological approaches together, identifying how various
instinctive drives and external determinants combined to result
in self-destructive behaviour.
IV
EXPLAINING THE SUICIDAL LEMMING: STRESSED RATS, NEUROTIC
CATS AND DEPRESSED MONKEYS
The lemming’s behaviour had become a recurring motif for mod-
ernity; yet how, exactly, did one explain its ‘suicidal routine’?
124
Seeking to understand the processes that determined animal
population dynamics, many, Pearl included, turned to the labora-
tory. Of particular importance was the work of a group of animal
120
Ibid., 15.
121
Ibid., 18.
122
See, for example, Gregory Zilboorg, ‘Sociology and the Psychoanalytic
Method’, American Journal of Sociology, xlv (1939); Maurice Halbwachs, Les Causes
du suicide (Paris, 1930).
123
Gregory Zilboorg, ‘The Sense of Reality’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, x (1941).
124
W. Duppa Crotch, ‘On the Migration and Habits of the Norwegian Lemming’,
The Journal of The Linnean Society, Zoology, xiii (1876), 34.
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ecologists employed on the Rodent Ecology Project at the Johns
Hopkins School of Public Health. The project, established in
1942, had been devising ecological methods of rat control.
125
By restricting the access of the animals to food, water and nesting
sites, competition for resources would be increased and, with it,
violence, reproductive dysfunction and death.
126
Critical to this
method was the work of one of the project researchers, John B.
Calhoun, whose approach had been inspired by Pearl’s studies of
closed laboratory populations, yet was increasingly informed by
the ideas of psychologists and psychiatrists.
127
Seeking to under-
stand the social behaviour of the rat, in 1947 Calhoun kept a small
number in a quarter-acre pen behind his house in Towson
Maryland and, later, once employed by the National Institute
of Mental Health (NIMH) from 1954, in a laboratory in a con-
verted barn.
128
Providing the animals with unlimited supplies of
food, water and nesting materials, he described his rodent uni-
verse as a ‘rat utopia’. With the subsequent increase in numbers in
a confined space, the pens soon heaved with animals, and utopia
rapidly descended into ‘hell’.
129
Dominant males became aggres-
sive and hypersexual marauders, attacking females, juveniles and
less active males, while females stopped caring for their young,
resulting in an infant mortality of 96 per cent. One, ‘ultimate’,
pathology captured his imagination. In a series of later experi-
ments in a ‘mouse paradise’, there emerged a class that no longer
competed for territory, status, food or mates, but huddled
125
For an analysis of the Rodent Ecology Project, see Christine Keiner, ‘Wartime
Rat Control, Rodent Ecology, and the Rise and Fall of Chemical Rodenticides’,
Endeavour, xxix (2005).
126
John B. Calhoun, The Ecology and Sociology of the Norway Rat (Bethesda,
Md, 1963).
127
Calhoun had received direct encouragement from Pearl in this regard, who
wrote to him in 1940, when Calhoun was a PhD student in zoology at
Northwestern. See John B. Calhoun, ‘Looking Backward from ‘‘The Beautiful
Ones’’’, in W. R. Klemm (ed.), Discovery Processes in Modern Biology (Melbourne,
Fla., 1977).
128
The most famous of Calhoun’s publications was based on this later research
with rats at the NIMH: John B. Calhoun, ‘Population Density and Social Pathology’,
Scientific American, cccvi (1962). For a history of Calhoun’s research and influence,
see Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams, ‘Escaping the Laboratory: the Rodent
Experiments of John B. Calhoun and their Cultural Influence’, Journal of Social
History, xlii (2009).
129
Halsey M. Marsden, ‘Crowding and Population Density’, in Joachim F.
Wohlwill and Daniel Carson (eds.), Environment and the Social Sciences: Perspectives
and Applications (Washington DC, 1972), 9.
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together in a motionless, silent mass, eating and drinking in
unison, and prone to sudden bursts of extreme violence. At the
highest levels of density, mice at the very bottom of the social
hierarchy had sacrificed their individual identities as a means
of physical preservation; they had stopped being mice, existing
only as ‘hollow shells’, ‘somnambulists’, ‘zombies’. Calhoun
described this pathology as ‘social autism’, the autism of the
group or mass. When entering into his experimental universe
to be photographed for Life magazine, females moved in
unison, following his feet around the pen (see Plate 2). They
were fearless and obsessive, the result of their infantile psycho-
logical state. Unable to breed, the experimental population tailed
off to extinction.
Prior to his employment at the NIMH, Calhoun had been briefly
employed, from 1951 to 1954, at the Walter Reed Army Medical
Center. He served as a memberof the neuropsychiatry division, the
military being curious as to the possible connections between the
mass behaviour of human beings and that of lemmings.
130
It was
not the mass migration of the animals but their destruction that
would prove his most enduring interest. Crucial was the concept
of stress, as suggested by the ecologist and physiologist John J.
Christian, Calhoun’s colleague at Johns Hopkins. Christian was
the first to apply the work of Hans Selye to animal ecology,
arguing that the social and psychological breakdown witnessed in
Calhoun’s crowded pens had physiological causes and conse-
quences.
131
Selye had applied acute, non-specific nocuous agents
to rodent bodies: extreme cold, surgical injury, excessive exercise
and injections of sub-lethal doses of various drugs. All had pro-
duced a typical ‘general adaptation syndrome’, the body respond-
ing to ‘stress agents’, either physical or behavioural, through the
hypothalamus, enabling the adrenal glands to release hormones
to maintain equilibrium. Selye had, in turn, built upon Walter
Cannon’s physiological principles of homeostasis: emotions of
rage and fear, necessary for ‘fight or flight’, could, if severe, have
destructive effects on the nervous system. For Selye, it seemed that
130
J. B. Calhoun, ‘The Theoretical Framework from which I Approach Problems
of Group Behavior’, Miscellaneous documents — set I, volume II — 1953–55 (folder 1
of 2), 1955: John B. Calhoun Papers, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda,
Maryland.
131
John J. Christian, ‘The Adreno-Pituitary System and Population Cycles in
Mammals’, Journal of Mammology, xxi (1950).
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under conditionsof constant stress, metabolic changes allowing for
reaction, resistance and the maintenance of equilibrium became
‘diseases of adaptation’, increasing mortality through adrenal
hypertrophy, hypertension, ulcers, and kidney and heart disease.
For Calhoun and his associates, errant behaviours and their
resultant stress-related illnesses served to dampen population
growth, ensuring that animals did not outstrip their means of sub-
sistence. Homeostasis at the level of the body functioned, there-
fore, at the level of the group and the species; while stress could be
destructive for the individual, psychopathological behaviour had
important, and necessary, ecological consequences. For Christian,
crowding stress not only provided a solution to Baltimore’s rat
problem, but also to the lemming question. Dennis Chitty, of
Oxford’s Bureau of Animal Population, agreed. Under the direc-
tion of Charles Elton, Chitty was also engaged in a rodent control
project in Britain. Instigating his own studies of crowding stress in
the vole, he identified the same excessive violence, sexual deviance,
withdrawal and increases in morbidity and mortality. There
existed, he declared, ‘a general law that all species are capable of
regulating their own population densities without either destroying
thefoodsources...ordependingonenemiesorclimaticacci-
dents’.
132
The mass ‘suicide’ of the lemming was not the conse-
quence of a purposeful march towards the sea; it was the inevitable
destruction, through stress-related behaviours and illnesses, of a
proportion of a population as an ecological system returned to a
condition of stable equilibrium. The lemming was more than a
mere metaphor: it was mentally and physically ill, a neurotic, its
personality shredded and disintegrated by conditions of high dens-
ity. Biologically predisposed to be a ‘rugged individualist’, to live
among the few not the many, it suffered when,like human beings, it
was forced to live among the crowd.
133
There is, however, considerable and persistent slippage in
Calhoun’s writing between the rhetorical and scientific uses of
the lemming. In a paper that was presented to the United States
Congress in 1971, Calhoun made the connection between the
132
Dennis Chitty, ‘Population Processes in the Vole and their Relevance to General
Theory’, Canadian Journal of Zoology, xxxviii (1960). On the British programme of
rodent control, see Dennis Chitty and H. N. Southern (eds.), Control of Rats and Mice,
3 vols. (Oxford, 1954).
133
Thomas Hornsby Ferril, ‘Western Half-Acre’, Harper’s Magazine, cxci
(1945), 534.
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suicidal lemming and the future of humanity because it was power-
ful and dramatic. Lemmings, like human beings, seemed deter-
mined to stand apart from the laws of the natural world, to disrupt
the so-called ‘balance’ of nature.
134
It allowed him to draw atten-
tion to a fundamental problem facing civilization — too many
people in too little space. The result was already evident in the
city: suicide, murder, rape, self-harm and, above all, the ‘second
death’, the death of the mind: ‘Lemmings are lemmings . . . Mice
are lemmings. Are there lemmings in our metropolitan tundras —
silent shadows of the selves they might have been ready to follow in
unquestioning masses any flickering figment on a glassy screen?
Are they ready to bring civilization to suicide?’
135
The lemming population found relief from its intolerable
situation by means of its ‘suicidal’ behaviour, allowing for its
‘rebirth’. Human beings, however, were trapped on ‘Spaceship
Earth’, just as Calhoun’s mice were trapped in their crowded
pens: ‘there can be no escape if things go awry’.
136
Further popu-
lation increase, Calhoun surmised, could have such devastating
effects on humanity that there would be no ‘rebirth’. This led
Calhoun to reflect: was the lemming an animal or was it an idea?
If the latter, were people more like lemmings than lemmings?
137
Yet, at a scientific level, the case of the lemming emphasized the
importance of the animal laboratory for the understanding of a
huge range of behavioural anomalies and mental and physical
illnesses. In the work of scientists, the lemming had a dual role:
it was, owing to its cultural resonance, a means of attracting
attention to the effect of the environment on behaviour and the
perilous advance of human civilization; yet, underlying the
lemmings’ apparent urges for self-destruction were the real
134
For Rene
´
Dubos, the population crashes experienced by the lemming revealed
nature to be short-sighted, clumsy and defective: ‘Judging from the point of view of
lemmings, muskrats, and rabbits — let alone human beings — only the most star-
ry-eyed Panglossian optimist could claim that nature knows best how to achieve popu-
lation control’. See Rene
´
J. Dubos, ‘Humanizing the Earth’, Science, clxxix (1973),
769. For a critique of the balance of nature concept, with which Calhoun would have
had much sympathy, see P. R. Ehrlich and L. C. Birch, ‘The ‘‘Balance of Nature’’
and ‘‘Population Control’’ ’, The American Naturalist, ci (1967).
135
John B. Calhoun, ‘The Lemmings’ Periodic Journeys are not Unique’,
Smithsonian Magazine, i (1971).
136
Marsden, ‘Crowding and Population Density’, 7.
137
Calhoun’s 1971 paper on the lemmings was presented as evidence of the dangers
of population growth and the need for government intervention by Senator Robert
Packwood, Congressional Record, 1 April 1971, 92nd congress, 1st session.
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processes of stress, processes that could be understood through
animal models. It was through the animal that suicide could be
understood not as an individualistic act of free will, but as the
consequence of social and biological forces. In the growing field of
environmental stress, animal research stimulated the study of the
ill-effects of crowding among humans, combining ecological
approaches with case histories.
138
The Edinburgh psychiatric
epidemiologist D. H. Stott, for example, argued that cases
of ‘pathological mothering’,
139
self-mutilation
140
and delin-
quency could be seen as natural ‘genetic provisions for lethal
defect’ activated among those at the bottom of the social hier-
archy.
141
The law of the lemming was active in the city: ‘The
young animals in the course of their wandering often show a dis-
regard for their own safety analogous to the inconsequent behav-
ior typical of many delinquents’.
142
Such ‘suicidal’ behaviours
had evolved because they had purpose or survival value for the
population: ‘limiting the numbers of a species to what can be
supported by the available food resource’.
143
In an analysis of
prisons, medical psychologists identified correlations between
physical space and ‘increased suicides, psychiatric commitments,
disciplinary infractions, violent deaths, and deaths due to natural
causes’.
144
For Ivor Mills, professor of medicine at Cambridge
and a leading scientist of stress in Britain, people were ‘human
lemmings’: individuals ‘rushing madly to or from work’, driven
into aggressive competition by overpopulation and overcrowd-
ing. ‘There has’, he reflected, ‘been a rapidly rising incidence of
‘‘attempted suicide’’ in this country’.
145
138
For a detailed analysis of the growth of the field of environmental stress, and the
role of crowding within it, see Edmund Ramsden, ‘From Rodent Utopia to Urban
Hell: Population, Pathology, and the Crowded Rats of NIMH’, Isis, cii (2011).
139
D. H. Stott, ‘Abnormal Mothering as a Cause of Mental Subnormality — II.
Case Study and Conclusions’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, iii (1962).
140
D. H. Stott,‘Cultural andNatural Checks on Population-Growth’, in M.F. Ashley
Montagu, (ed.), Culture and the Evolution of Man (New York, 1962), 365–6.
141
Denis Stott, Delinquency: the Problem and its Prevention (London, 1982), 201.
142
Ibid.
143
Stott, ‘Abnormal Mothering as a Cause of Mental Subnormality’, 145.
144
Paul B. Paulus and Garvin McCain, ‘Crowding in Jails’, Basic and Applied Social
Psychology, iv (1983), 89. See also Paul B. Paulus, Prison Crowding: a Psychological
Perspective (New York, 1988).
145
Ivor H. Mills, ‘The Human Lemmings: Escape From Realities of Life’, The
Times, 30 May 1970.
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Calhoun’s research on population dynamics dovetailed with
emerging fields of experimental psychiatry and psychobiology in
the United States. As Zilboorg noted, experimenters had come
across cases of extremely disturbed behaviours in their labora-
tories.
146
By building upon such cases, psychiatrists such as Jules
H. Masserman at Yale sought to bridge what he described as the
‘chasm’ between psychoanalysis the study of ‘lower’ forms of
life.
147
For Masserman, human beings differed from other chor-
dates only with regard to the degree of versatility provided by
their ‘many technics of adaptation’.
148
The underlying causes of
mental disorders were the same. Thus, he argued, in the controlled
environment of the laboratory and by following animals through
time, it was possible to provide a better understanding of affective
disorders. With regard to Freud’s death instinct, they could exam-
ine if ‘ostensibly self-punitive or self-destructive behavior occa-
sionally observed in animals’, and in Norwegian lemmings in
particular, were ‘based on deviant individual experiences without
primal atavistic urges’.
149
While Masserman focused his attention
on the alcoholic behaviour of neurotic cats, rather than suicide per
se, he was pioneering in his attempts to provide the theories of
psychoanalysis with a rigorous and objective scientific basis
through the animal laboratory.
As the field of experimental psychiatry developed through the
mid twentieth century, its practitioners refined the standards of
validity regarding the animal model. They increasingly emphasized
heuristic value over behavioural similarity; that an animal model
could mirror exactly a specific behavioural disorder in humans was
considered a ‘utopian goal’.
150
The importance of ‘face validity’
(surface equivalence) was not as great as ‘construct validity’ (func-
tional equivalence). Influenced by the growing number of etholo-
gical and ecological studies of animal behaviour, psychiatrists and
psychologists were seeking models of psychopathology that relied
less on the use of artificial methods, such as electric shocks, to
146
Zilboorg, ‘Considerations on Suicide’, 24.
147
Jules H. Masserman, Behavior and Neurosis: an Experimental Psychoanalytic
Approach to Psychobiologic Principles (Chicago, 1943), 6–7.
148
Jules H. Masserman, ‘Comparative and Clinical Approaches to Biodynamic
Therapy’, in Jules H. Masserman, (ed.), Animal and Human: Scientific Proceedings of
the American Academy of Psychoanalysis (New York, 1968), 253.
149
Jules H. Masserman, Principles of Dynamic Psychiatry (Philadelphia, 1961), 195.
150
Israel Hanin and Earl Usdin, ‘Foreword’, in I. Hanin and E. Usdin (eds.),
Animal Models in Psychiatry and Neurology (Rockville, 1977), xiii.
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replicate a human disorder, as in Masserman’s studies, and more on
the manipulation of meaningful functional relationships between
animals in their social and physical environments. For example, the
psychiatrist William T. McKinney, a leading figure in delineating
standards of validity in modelling, joined the psychologist Harry
Harlow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the late 1960s to
study the psychopathological effects of isolation among rhesus
monkeys. McKinney argued that the study of isolation among ani-
mals was of value ‘in its own right to better understand the under-
lying mechanisms associated with separation reactions. It is not
necessary and even dangerous, perhaps, to make a priori assump-
tions about clinical labels that might apply to separation, to social
isolation or other situations’.
151
Such clinical labels, and their
related etiologies, were often problematic in any case, and animal
studies could ‘help clarify in a more systematic way some param-
eters of the human syndromes’.
152
Isolation from mothers and
peers functioned, just as Calhoun’s crowded housing, as an experi-
mental system that allowed for the study of the underlying causes
and mechanisms of a wide range of psychopathologies, including
various forms of self-destructive behaviour.
153
The early life experiences of Harlow’s animals were identified as
critical to their future psychological health. Among the isolated
monkeys, some would withdraw and become severely depressed,
displaying ‘autistic self-clutching and rocking’, and refusing food
to the point of dying from ‘emotional anorexia’
154
— the conse-
quence of ‘psychological death produced by social loss’.
155
Others
resorted to violence, expressing ‘suicidal aggression toward
adults’, or ‘inwardly toward the animal’s own body’.
156
In a
series of studies that built upon Harlow’s work, the psychiatrist
Ivor Jones described how: ‘The confined macaque inflicts severe
151
William T. McKinney Jr, ‘Behavioral Models of Depression in Monkeys’, in
Hanin and Usdin, (eds.), Animal Models in Psychiatry and Neurology, 117.
152
Ibid.
153
Laurens D. Young, Stephen S. Suomi, Harry Harlow and William T. McKinney
Jr, ‘Early Stress and Later Response to Separation in Rhesus Monkeys’, Amer ican
Journal of Psychiatry, cxxx (1973).
154
Harry F. Harlow, Robert O. Dodsworth and Margaret K. Harlow, ‘Total Social
Isolation in Monkeys’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America, liv (1965), 92.
155
Harry F. Harlow, Philip E. Plubell and Craig M. Baysinger, ‘Induction of
Psychological Death in Rhesus Monkeys’, Jour nal of Autism and Childhood
Schizophrenia, iii (1973), 299.
156
Harlow, Dodsworth and Harlow, ‘Total Social Isolation in Monkeys’, 95, 90.
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injury with its teeth and claws, gashing limbs, trunk, and scrotum
and making deep bites to accessible sites on its own body’.
157
Such
violent behaviours, often resulting in the death of the animal, were
again described in the context of a ‘homeostatic mechanism’: vent-
ing aggression on the self or others restored the degree of arousal to
‘tolerable limits’,
158
and served as ‘a way to self-regulate at times of
stress’.
159
Psychiatrists such as Bettelheim drew directly on such experi-
ments, focusing more fully on the effects of isolation in various
dehumanizing regimes and destructive environments.
160
Karl
Menninger combined the concept of stress with psychoanalysis
as it gave physiological support to ideas of homeostatic regulation
in psychological processes. He noted how the behaviour of experi-
mental animals was ‘analogous’ to the ‘catastrophic breakdown’ of
human patients under extreme stress.
161
The influential British
psychiatrist John Bowlby combined the work of Harlow with that
of ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz, praising them for having
finally provided ‘an adequate scientific framework’ which could
identify why the disruption of affectional bonds could cause an
individual to be ‘crushed by grief and die of a broken heart’ or
‘do things that are foolish or dangerous to himself and others’.
162
157
Ivor H. Jones, ‘Self-injury: toward a Biological Basis’, Perspectives in Biology and
Medicine, xxvi (1982), 138.
158
Jones, ‘Self-injury’, 140.
159
Thomas Joiner, Why People Die by Suicide (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 115.
160
Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self
(New York, 1967).
161
Karl A. Menninger, ‘Psychological Aspects of the Organism Under Stress —
Part II, Regulatory Devices of the Ego Under Major Stress’, Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, ii (1954), 297. It is important to note that not all psycho-
analysts viewed animal research with such unanimity. Many saw it as a direct challenge
to their authority, particularly with the rise of behaviour therapy as an alternative to
psychotherapy in the 1960s. The president of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, Leo Rangell, spoke of a growing ‘disenchantment’ with psychoanalysis
— ‘Anything else is seized upon as furnishing an alternative ‘‘explanation’’, whether
Lorenz’s imprinting, Harlow’s experimentally treated primates ...orthebehavior of
dolphins or flies’. See Leo Rangell, ‘Psychoanalysis — A Current Look’, Bulletin of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, xxiii (1967). Evidence of the primary importance
of touch between mother and infant in Harlow’s studies was an important challenge to
Freudian ideas which interpreted it as a secondary phenomenon resulting from need
satisfaction.
162
John Bowlby, ‘Disruption of Affectional Bonds and its Effects on Behavior’,
Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, ii (1970), 75. See also John Bowlby,
‘Processes of Mourning’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, xlii (1961), in
which he suggested that the processes of grief and despair were shared by dogs,
geese and monkeys, concluding that ‘the presence of hostility directed towards the
THE SUICIDAL ANIMAL
237
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He also focused on aggression and frustration, suggesting
correlations between self-injury among animals and self-injurious
and suicidal states in human beings. Ivor Jones not only posited
associations between the behaviour of ‘macaques in confinement’
and socially deprived children — rubbing, biting, scratching, head-
banging and hair-pulling — but between the high rates of self-
mutilation among adult prisoners and the behaviour of caged
animals.
163
While there was much to differentiate between a
laboratory monkey and a lemming in the wild, Jones argued that
animals experienced isolation within, and because of, the
crowd.
164
While Jones noted that it was commonly assumed that ‘thought’
initiated the act of self-injury among humans, ‘the order may in fact
be reversed, thought being used to elaborate and transform, rather
than initiate’.
165
For Jones, in common with psychoanalysts, self-
injury and suicide existed on the same continuum, the former a
means of understanding the latter. Thus, while many assumed that
it was only humans that committed suicide by virtue of being able
to visualise and arrange their own deaths:
... this formulation implies that the processes leading to suicide are
rational, which may be untrue: depression in most suicides probably
impairs the capacity for rational thought while at the same time inducing
suicide impulses. We suggest that suicide may be a uniquely human
attribute only because our definition of it makes it so; in other words, if
(n. 162 cont.)
self’ was not specific to man. Bowlby was critical of notions such as the ‘death instinct’,
as it was ‘rooted in a non-evolutionary paradigm that bears no relation to modern
biology’ — John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, ii, Separation: Anxiety and Anger
(London, 1975), 205. In turn, Harlow and his associates presented their studies of
‘separation stress’ as providing much-needed animal models for human psychopath-
ology, particularly depression, attempted suicide, suicidal impulses and ‘despair’, as
studied by Bowlby. (See Young, Suomi, Harlow and McKinney, ‘Early Stress and
Later Response to Separation in Rhesus Monkeys’, 401.)
163
Jones, ‘Self-injury’, 141.
164
Jones, ‘Self-injury’, 146. For a similar comparison between self-mutilation
among experimental monkeys and among overcrowded prisoners experiencing alien-
ation within ‘the lonely crowd’, see Armando R. Favazza, Bodies under Siege: Self-
Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry (Baltimore, 1992), 77.
Bernice Einsidler and L. D. Hankoff similarly argue that death from the stress of the
crowd, hastened by self-injury, reveals the term suicide to be of ‘dubious scientific
usefulness, incorporating as it does the notion of choice or intent’. Suicidal behaviour,
they argue, does not require ‘a knowledge or concept of self’. ‘Self-Injury in Animals’,
in Bernice Einsidler and L. D. Hankoff (eds.), Suicide: Theory and Clinical Aspects
(Littleton, 1979), 138, 139.
165
Jones, ‘Self Injury’, 148.
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suicide were to be defined as a destructive act inflicted on the self leading
to death, then animal analogies do exist.
166
Humans did, of course, have many more techniques for self-
destruction at their disposal. However, the non-human animal
was seen to provide a means of understanding the underlying psy-
chobiological mechanisms and processes which, in combination
with social and ecological factors, determined suicidal behaviour
in man. Depression, hopelessness and self-harming as release from
stress and tension were seen to underlie suicidal acts, as scientists
increasingly pushed for the understanding of suicide as a manifest-
ation of a broader class of behaviours.
167
For this reason, the use of
animal models in the study of self-destructive behaviour continues
apace in psychology and psychiatry.
168
Interest in self-destructive
animals has also been further encouraged by the development of the
fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, with E. O.
Wilson beginning (and concluding) his controversial tome with
reference to Albert Camus’ famous declaration: ‘There is but one
truly serious philosophical question and that is suicide’.
169
Sharing
166
I. H. Jones and B. M. Barraclough, ‘Auto-Mutilation in Animals and its
Relevance to Self-Injury in Man’, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, lviii (1978) 40–7.
167
On this point, see David Lester, ‘The Categorization of Suicide’, The Behavioral
and Brain Sciences, iii (1980), 281.
168
For reviews of the use of animal models of suicidal behaviour, see Jacqueline N.
Crawley, Mary E. Sutton and David Pickar, ‘Animal Models of Self-destructive
Behavior and Suicide’, Psychiatric Clinics of North America, viii (1985); David M.
Stoff and J. John Mann, ‘Suicide Research: Overview and Introduction’, Annals of
the New York Academyof Sciences, dcccxxxvi (1997); Robert D. Goldney, ‘Ethology and
Suicidal Behaviour’, in Keith Hawton and Kees van Heeringen (eds.), The
International Handbook of Suicide and Attempted Suicide (Chichester, 2000); Antonio
Preti, ‘Animal Model and Neurobiology of Suicide’, Progress in Neuro-
Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, xxxv (2011); Oz Malkesman et al.,
‘Animal Models of Suicide-Trait-Related Behaviors’, Trends in Pharmacological
Sciences, xxx (2009).
169
Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: the New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).
Wilson argued that one would see countless instances of self-destruction in the animal
kingdom — evolutionary adaptations that benefit a population. For his critics, such as
the population geneticist, Richard Lewontin, ‘it is pure metaphor’, he argued, ‘to de-
scribe numbers of chromosomes, patterns of fertility, migrations, and religious institu-
tions as ‘‘adaptations’’. It is this kind of error that led to the now discredited descriptions
of lemming ‘‘migrations’’ and ‘‘mass suicides’’ as adaptive responses to crowding’. R. C.
Lewontin, ‘On Constraints and Adaptation’, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences,ii
(1981), 245. For Lewontin the suicidal lemming assumed pride of place in his dismissal
of the excessive search for adaptive explanation as a ‘test of the ingenuity of theorists and
of the tolerance of intellectuals for tortured and absurd stories’. Richard Levins and
Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Bio lo gist (Boston, 1985), 73. For a more recent socio-
biological treatment that suggests suicide has an adaptive value, removing (through
stress) those who are burdens and childless, see Denys deCatanzaro, ‘Human Suicide:
THE SUICIDAL ANIMAL
239
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the approach of animal ecologists, sociobiologists aim to explain the
evolutionary purpose of self-destructive behaviour. While, much
like the scorpion, the lemming is no longer seen as directly analo-
gous to a human suicide in scientific literature,
170
the study of self-
destructive behaviour remains focused on stress as a critical psycho-
physiological mechanism that functions in both individuals and
populations, human and non-human. Concomitantly, and in con-
trast to the ideas of the nineteenth century, those who object to the
concept of the animal suicide do so not because it concedes inten-
tion, will and reflective action to the non-human animal, but be-
cause it is seen to deny them to the human. As one of the leading
suicidologists to focus on understanding individual and personal
motives, Edwin S. Shneidman declared suicide needed to be ana-
lysed in terms of ‘conscious intention’: ‘We shall not be concerned
at all with migrating lemmings or mourning dogs’.
171
V
CONCLUSION
The self-destructive animal is central to our understanding of the
nature of suicide. Even when used as a means of criticizing the
extremes of anthropomorphism, it performs a crucial social and
philosophical function.
172
When people reject the possibility of an
(n. 169 cont.)
a Biological Perspective’, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, iii (1980). While
deCatanzaro assesses, but rejects, a number of cases of self-destruction among animals
as suicide, some of his commentators do not: ‘It appears very likely that suicide may
occur in animals in the absence of a knowledge or concept of self’: F. V. Wenz, ‘Heredity,
Environment, and Culture in Suicide’, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, iii (1980).
170
The case of the lemming’s behaviour continues to be debated by scientists, but
few see it as the consequence of a suicidal urge. Central to the debate is whether
population dynamics are determined by self-regulatory processes such as stress or
by the lemmings’ migration in search of dwindling food supplies. See, for example,
Chitty, Do Lemmings Commit Suicide?
171
Edwin Shneidman, Suicide as Psychache: a Clinical Approach to Self-Destructive
Behavior (Northvale, 1993), 5.
172
For example, in an introductory psychology textbook, Philip Bell and Phillip
Staines argue: ‘The tendency to anthropomorphism is very great when apparently
inexplicable biological phenomena appear to be like those of human society: hence
the widely held interpretation of the mass migration of lemmings which culminates in
their death as an act of ‘‘suicide’’ — an interpretation which a moment’s reflection will
show to be very difficult to sustain. For example, does each lemming (a small rodent)
consciously ‘‘decide’’ that its life is not worth living?’ Philip Brian Bell and Phillip
James Staines, Reasoning and Argument in Psychology (London, 1981), 102.
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animal committing suicide, they reserve not only the act itself for
humans, but many traits that enable it — emotion, intelligence,
mind and consciousness. As a distinctly ‘human privilege’, suicide
becomes constitutive of the human, as Jean Baechler argues: ‘Not
only does suicide presuppose a conscious being, it is also present
as a potential within every conscious being. That is why neither
animals, very young children, nor sick people whose mental facul-
ties have been destroyed commit suicide’.
173
The prevailing understanding of suicide as a uniquely human
act is dependent on our understanding of the non-human —
commonly viewed, in the words of Henri Bergson, as a creature
‘clinging to life’, simply ‘carried along by its impetus’.
174
Yet this
very dependence also provides a means of challenging such def-
initions. We have seen how generations of writers, scholars and
scientists have turned to the animal in order to question, at its very
core, the nature of suicide.
For the Romantics, the celebrated case of the defiant and
rebellious scorpion was a means of interpreting suicide not as a
sinful but a just, even heroic, act. In transferring the scorpion from
poetry to experimental laboratory, late nineteenth-century scien-
tists and physicians sought to remove the subject of suicide further
from the realm of ethics and morality, and place it under their own
jurisdiction. Suicide was not so much a matter for the legal or
clerical profession; it was a natural, medical and social problem
of genuine and increasing significance. In challenging boundaries
between humanity and the natural world in the context of mind
and emotion, the suicidal animal was also attractive as it extended a
scientific, and specifically Darwinian, understanding into areas
considered most sacred and profane, into the heart of religious
jurisdiction. There remained a certain Romantic element in play
here: humans were not so much debased as the animal promoted
— its urge to self-destruction reflecting genuine emotions of grief,
anger and love, and therefore reason, intelligence and mind. This is
reflected in the sympathetic uses made of animal suicide by those
concerned with the maltreatment of animals.
Even when such anthropomorphism was challenged by the
development of a more rigorous comparative psychology based
173
Jean Baechler, Suicides, trans. Barry Cooper (Oxford, 1979), 42.
174
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra,
Cloudesley Brereton and W. Horsfall Carter (London, 1935), 108.
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on systematic observation and the experimental method, this did
not mean the end of the suicidal animal. Its influence endured
with its redefinition. The lemming became the archetypal suicidal
animal in the twentieth century precisely because of its lack of
intelligence, foresight and consciousness. Lemmings were used to
describe the senseless devastation of global warfare and to warn of
the violence of totalitarian political systems. As the century
progressed, the collective impulse became more prominent,
and the lemming became less a self-destroyer and more of an
automaton. The lemming became the totemic animal in an age
of cultural pessimism, a symbol of an unconscious and mindless
urge towards mass self-destruction, and references to its suicide
are legion.
Simultaneously, interest in explaining lemming behaviour led
once again to the animal laboratory. The boundaries between
human beings and the natural world were challenged, but now in
a more sophisticated way and with a zoomorphic sensibility. Suicide
was understood as the outcome of a large variety of other behav-
iours and disorders, and through the study of a variety of animals —
lemmings, rats, dogs and monkeys — such behaviours could now
be created, analysed, understood, even ameliorated, in a range of
experimental situations. The sciences of ecology, physiology,
psychology and psychiatry were imbued with, and connected by,
the language of stress. The systems of physiology and behaviour,
body and population, were united, making their functions predict-
able and intervention possible. The understanding gained through
animal modelling had significant implications for the study of
human beings. For scientists in these disciplines, suicide was a sin-
gularly human act only because our definition made it so. By iden-
tifying self-destructive behaviours in non-human animals, they
were again able to challenge what they interpreted as culturally
determined and value-laden definitions of suicide as a unitary,
intentional and wilful act. Nature and its systems demanded our
understanding, no matter how often it served as a state from which
we seemed determined to emancipate ourselves.
Queen Mary, University of London Edmund Ramsden
University of Manchester Duncan Wilson
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