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Figure 3.10.
“Prefrontal lobotomy, Sir . . .” Source: Beer 1994a, 162. (Courtesy
of Cwarel Isaf Institute and malik management Zentrum St. gallen [www.management
.kybernetik.com, www.malik-mzsg.ch].)
CORA, “the possibility of a conflict neurosis immediately appears,” and in a
follow-up article in August 1951 he observed that (63) “it becomes only too
easy to establish an experimental neurosis. Thus if the arrangement is such
that the sound becomes positively associated both with the attracting light
and with the withdrawal from an obstacle, it is possible for both a light and a
sound to set up a paradoxical withdrawal. The 'instinctive' attraction to a light
is abolished and the model can no longer approach its source of nourishment.
This state seems remarkably similar to the neurotic behavior produced in hu-
man beings by exposure to conflicting influences or inconsistent education.”
Or, as he put it more poetically in
The Living Brain
(1953, 183), “in trying, as it
were, to sort out the implications of its dilemma, the model ends up, 'sicklied
o'er with the pale cast of thought,' by losing all power of action.”
47
The idea that mental problems might be precipitated by conflicting pat-
terns of conditioning was not original to Walter. As he acknowledged, its
history went back to the induction of “experimental neuroses” in dogs by
clashing conditioning regimes, carried out in the laboratory of “the master,”
Pavlov himself, in 1921 (Gray 1979, 119; Pavlov 1927).
48
And in March 1950,
for example, two months before Walter's first tortoise article appeared,
Scien-
tific American
featured an article entitled “Experimental Neuroses” by Jules
Masserman, a psychiatrist at Northwestern University, which discussed the
induction of pathological symptoms by cross-conditioning in cats. Drawing
upon Auguste Comte's typology, Masserman argued that the experimentaliza-
tion of neuroses moved psychiatry from the “mystic” and “taxonomic” stages
into the ultimate “dynamic” phase of “science” (Masserman 1950). Walter
could have made the same point about his experiments with CORA. And one
