Ethology and Psychiatry (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780802033123)

This book signals the first comprehensive attempt to examine the territory shared by ethology and psychiatry. It is designed both as an introduction to, and as a reference-source book for, the relationship between the two disciplines. Eminent authors from both fields comment on the concerns with ethologists and psychiatrists share and investigate how ethology might be used to help understand distressed and disordered human behaviour. Scientific recognition has been given to this cruicial theoretical link in the 1973 Nobel Medicine award to Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch.
Although it is scarcely novel to postulate that human behaviour and experience ought to be appreciated in biological terms, our facile translation of zoological nations into human terms has often been naive. Men is an evolving species and it is within this context, the contributors argue, that all our ideas about his existence are best understood.

These essays touch on some enormously important social issues and introduce a conceptual advance in the approach to human dysfunction. They will be valuable for biological scientists and workers in the 'helping professions' and important and stimulating for a wide range of general readers as well.

These essays tough on some enormously important social issues and introduce a conceptual advance in the approach to human dysfunction. They will be valuable for biological scientists and workers in the 'helping professions' and important and stimulating for a wide range of general readers as well.

The fourteen chapters of this volume offer guidance for the application of animal studies to human questions. Specific topic areas include mother/infant relationships, learning, aggression, the evolution of interpersonal behaviour, and social organization. Observations have been gathered from several species, including monkeys, baboons, birds, and cats -- as well as humans.

The contents arose out of the third annual Hincks Memorial Lecture, held under the auspices of the Ontario Mental Health Foundation, at McMaster University.