Yerkes, Hamilton and the experimental study of the ape mind: from evolutionary psychiatry to eugenic politics.
Robert Yerkes is a pivotal figure in American psychology and primatology in the first half of the twentieth century. As is well known, Yerkes first studied ape intelligence in 1915, on a visit to the private California laboratory of the psychiatrist Gilbert Hamilton, a former student. Less widely appreciated is how far the work done at the Hamilton lab, in its aims and ambitions as well as its techniques, served as a template for much of Yerkes's research thereafter. This paper uses the Hamilton-Yerkes relationship to re-examine Yerkes's career and, more generally, that of American psychology in the early twentieth century. Three points especially are emphasized: first, the role of Freudian psychoanalysis as a spur to Hamilton's experimental studies of ape intelligence; second, the importance of Hamilton's laboratory, with its semi-wild population of monkeys and ape, as a model for Yerkes's efforts to create a laboratory of his own; and third, the influence on Yerkes of Hamilton's optimism about experimental psychological studies of nonhuman primates as a source of lessons beneficial to a troubled human world.
Thomas
Marion
M
REHSEIS (Laboratoire de recherches épistémologiques et historiques sur les sciences exactes et les institutions scientifiques), CNRS/Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot, 2 place Jussieu, 75251 Paris cedex 05, France. mcmthomas@wanadoo.fr
D000328:Adult; D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D001527:Behaviorism; D005075:Biological Evolution; D001689:Biological Psychiatry; D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior; D005053:Eugenics; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D015186:Hominidae; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007360:Intelligence; D001523:Mental Disorders; D011057:Politics; D011323:Primates; D011572:Psychoanalysis; D011584:Psychology / Q000266:history*; D014481:United States