ABSTRACT
This is the creature that has burrowed its way into the minds of patients, that can haunt their dreams, that can induce an almost instant trauma if it turns up unexpectedly in places where it is least wanted. Ethology, had been created in protest and as an alternative to the then fashionable animal experiments of American behaviourists in the early twentieth century. Its founder, Konrad Lorenz, had once famously written that American psychologists “did not know animals”. As a rule, the experimental psychologist tends to overrate the neutrality of their stance, and to underestimate how much their so-called objective results are being subjectively tainted. Unlike the psychotherapist—who is privy to and hungry for every nuance of the patient’s thought and feeling—the experimental psychologist is free to be blissfully unaware of what the subject really thinks of the experiment in which he or she is participating.
