Catatonic Cats

For hours she sat in her corner, staring silently into space, her pupils dilated, her heart pounding, her breathing labored. She shunned her old friends, refused to eat for days at a time. Occasionally she became agitated or infantile and kittenish. But often she just sat, in a catatonic stupor, brooding and lonely, quiet as a cat.

In fact, she was a cat. She was a typical example of some 200 animals made neurotic by University of Chicago Psychoanalyst Jules H. Masserman in the last three years. His purpose in this scientific cat & mouse game: to find out by experiment what makes & breaks a neurosis. At the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Boston last fortnight Psychoanalyst Masserman presented his results, showed movies of the first animals in medical history who were first given nervous breakdowns, then cured of them by psychotherapy.

How To Go Crazy. Working on a grant from the Otho Sprague Institute, Dr. Masserman rigged up an automatic feeding apparatus which dropped some food into the feedbox of a glass cage every time a light flashed on. He then trained cats, one at a time, to lift the lid of the feedbox whenever the light flashed. After the cats were conditioned to associate light with food, he shot a harmless blast of air into the cage at the moment the cat reached for the lid. This gale at mealtime frightened the cats. After repeated frustrations the animals associated the feedbox and signal light with fear. Frustration and the conflict between hunger and fright drove the cats quietly mad.

Like human beings, they showed their psychic illnesses in many ways. They developed "anxiety neuroses," their fur stood on end, they crouched, they trembled. Some refused to eat, or became food faddists. Some became catatonic cats.

How to Get Sane. Dr. Masserman left the animals to their phobias and conflicts for several months, then set out to cure them by psychiatric sessions in the experimental cage. One group he treated by "reassurance and suggestion." The cats were gently carried to the feedbox, stroked and fondled, petted and coaxed to eat. At first, when the doctor stopped stroking, the cats stopped feeding. But gradually they lost their fears.

A second group he treated by a method often tried on pilots who have crashed. He made the cats "break through" their phobias by forcing them to eat, in much the same way that a cracked-up pilot is sometimes forced to fly again. Cats handled pilot-fashion not only overcame their fright but turned into daredevils, learned to enjoy blasts of air with their dinners.

Most unique cat therapy was a method employed in human psychoanalysis. Like a good psychoanalyst, Dr. Masserman quietly observed his patients as they "worked through'' their own problems. They were given many opportunities to fiddle with the light switches and the lid of the box, learn for themselves what had produced their neuroses. Through repeated trials they gradually developed "insight" into the sequence of light switch, food, air blast, finally became welladjusted, normal cats.

Concerning this striking evidence of psychotherapy's biological basis, Dr. Masserman cryptically notes at the end of his film: "Any similarity between these experiments and human behavior is purely coincidental?]." On the cats' opinion of human behavior, Dr. Masserman said nothing.

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