ABSTRACT
… At first sight it seems clear that the phenomena that the psychiatrist studies are more easily comparable with those which concern the student of animal behaviour than with those which confront the physiologist. This is because both the animal experimenter and the animal ethologist, like the psychiatrist, start from an observed correlation between a ‘situation’ and a ‘disorganization of behaviour’. Disorganization can take many forms: the unbearably frustrated man may break down into rage or tears or lethargy; he may begin to act at random or to adopt irrelevant behaviour, or to stop acting at all. So, within his compass, may the frustrated rat behave, and these differences in form of breakdown may be interesting as indices of temperament—but all serve equally well as indices of disorganization.
