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 siècle
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, meanwhile, portrays Durkheim as the ‘prodigal child’ of nineteenth-century
positivism, in that he believed statistics could illuminate 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 ‘excludes from our study everything
related to the suicide of animals’.
7
Contemporary knowledge of the animal mind, Durkheim argued, ‘does not really attribute
to them an understanding anticipatory 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 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 consciousness’.
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 should be reversed: to explain the animal is to explain the human’.
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 world by representing animals as insensate and
irrational.
13
While this would appear to be the case with Suicide, it is by no means the whole story.
By arguing that animals did not intentionally kill themselves, 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 suicide. 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 sympathy
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 siècle period was marked by a ‘universal wish not to live’, in which
human self-destruction was a trend, process or ‘disease of civilization’.
14
Within this shift, the archetype of animal suicide was transposed from the romanticized
or insane individual to the anomic population. As a consequence, the endangered scorpion
and grieving 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 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 physiological responses to stimuli. By the
mid twentieth century, a zoomorphic perspective had not only become paradigmatic in
fields that investigated the animal mind and behaviour, such as psychology, 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 unconscious 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 o’er guilty woes’, he wrote, ‘Is like
the scorpion girt by fire’. With clear human inference, he outlined how endangered
scorpions intentionally 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, increasing 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, he notably stressed that the suicide, with its planning and ‘repeated
efforts’, offered definitive ‘proof of the general instinct and sagacity of the canine
race’.
19
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’.
1.
The front cover to a January 1875 edition of The Animal World, showing a reputed case
of animal suicide on the south coast of Britain. Reproduced with permission of the
British Library Board.
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 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 demonstrated 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 influential reformist John Conolly, Lindsay claimed
that human 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 management 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, captivity, 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 ‘instinctive love of life’ and attachment to others, the
act itself remained ‘deliberate and intentional, the result of choice and consideration’.
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
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 contrast 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 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 engendering
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
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 ‘determine
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 ‘deliberately 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 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 experiments, 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
Westcott’s calls for more research were echoed by the comparative 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 laboratory
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 experimentation,
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 tendency
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
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 misinterpreting
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 comparable
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
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-anthropomorphic stance served as a badge of professionalism.
70
In psychology 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 productive 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 isolation and mobility. The
second, most prominent among psychiatrists 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 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 biologist’.
72
In Suicide, a most private and individualistic act was explained 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 naturalistic metaphors: populations
had their own suicide rates, determined, for Durkheim, by ‘real living active forces’
independent 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 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 individual and independent faculties, but certainly
as a social phenomenon 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 unconsciously’.
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 ‘psychical (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 approaching the natural’,
82
while the ‘idiot’ rarely committed suicide, being ‘led exactly like the beast of the
field’.
83
Strahan drew upon the work of Morselli and turned to heredity for an explanation for
the increase in suicide in civilized nations. While carriers of suicidal impulses
were eradicated in nature, they, like those of 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 dynamics, the fact that suicide rates seemed to increase with population
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 preservation of the species’.
88
Following an explosion in numbers every 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 movement, 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 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 fundamental 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 popularity 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 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 mistakenly 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 obsession, a one tracked thought’. The image of thousands
of identical rodents following a ‘leader’ to their destruction was here, perhaps,
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 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 modern 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 automatons 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
as childhood schizophrenia, was an individual’s response to feeling totally overpowered.
In order to prevent complete annihilation, 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 metaphor, 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 humanity 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 reported 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 definition 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 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, dehydration 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 consideration, 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 children and the ‘primitive races’, such as the Mohave.
114
While Zilboorg considered the idea of a death instinct to lack explanatory power,
115
he similarly described suicide in terms of a biological 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
inability 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 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
complicated 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 modernity; 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 laboratory. Of particular importance was the work of
a group of animal 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 understand 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 converted barn.
128
Providing the animals with unlimited supplies of food, water and nesting materials,
he described his rodent universe 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 aggressive 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 experiments in a ‘mouse paradise’, there emerged a class that
no longer competed for territory, status, food or mates, but huddled 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 psychological
state. Unable to breed, the experimental population tailed off to extinction.
2.
John B. Calhoun entering an experimental mouse ‘universe'. From John B. Calhoun Papers.
Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.
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 member of 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 consequences.
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 produced a typical ‘general adaptation syndrome’, the body responding
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 under conditions of 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 subsistence. Homeostasis at the level of the body functioned, therefore,
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 direction 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 the food sources … or depending on enemies or climatic accidents’.
132
The mass ‘suicide’ of the lemming was not the consequence 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 density. 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 suicidal
lemming and the future of humanity because it was powerful and dramatic. Lemmings,
like human beings, seemed determined to stand apart from the laws of the natural world,
to disrupt the so-called ‘balance’ of nature.
134
It allowed him to draw attention 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 population 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 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 delinquency could be seen as natural ‘genetic provisions for lethal defect’ activated
among those at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
141
The law of the lemming was active in the city: ‘The young animals in the course of
their wandering often show a disregard for their own safety analogous to the inconsequent
behavior 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 overcrowding. ‘There has’,
he reflected, ‘been a rapidly rising incidence of “attempted suicide” in this country’.
145
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 laboratories.
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 chordates 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 examine if ‘ostensibly self-punitive or self-destructive behavior
occasionally 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’ (functional equivalence). Influenced by the growing number of ethological
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 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 animals was of value ‘in its own right to better understand
the underlying mechanisms associated with separation reactions. It is not necessary
and even dangerous, perhaps, to make a priori assumptions 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 parameters
of the human syndromes’.
152
Isolation from mothers and peers functioned, just as Calhoun’s crowded housing, as
an experimental 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 consequence 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 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’: venting 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 experiments, 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 experimental 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
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 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
psychobiological 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 manifestation 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 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 analogous 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 contrast to the ideas of the nineteenth century, those who object
to the concept of the animal suicide do so not because it concedes intention, will
and reflective action to the non-human animal, but because 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 analysed 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 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 faculties 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 definitions. 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 scientists
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 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 behaviours 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 predictable
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 singularly human act only because our definition made it so. By identifying
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.