Nature, Nurture and Nim: Trauma in Sentient Beings

This is a book about the bond between sentient beings. It explores the non-verbal space between two entities, and asks questions like: What is a healthy human being? Is it nature? Nurture? Nature via nurture? How are we born with personality traits, emotion, mood, language abilities, and intelligence? What do we know about attachment, family structure, and genetic inheritance?

Dr Anna Scarnà and Robert Ingersoll use the life history of the chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky and his family: parents Carolyn and Pan, companion Lilly, their daughter, Sheba, and an assortment of human carers, to explain the hallmarks of healthy human psychological development. What makes humans ＂human＂, and chimpanzees, ＂chimpanzees＂? Do chimpanzees have a personality, or should we consider them to have a ＂chimpanality?＂

Robert, close friend and carer of Nim, gives the facts about Nim’s upbringing and first-degree relatives, and Anna reports with reference to theories of brain, personality, self, and language. Together they explain what can be drawn from psychological research and reanalyse the chimpanzee work from the 1960s and 1970s in order to honour and respect the memory of those animals.

Robert Ingersoll (BSc, MS) is a tireless champion of captive chimpanzees. He entered the world of primates as an undergraduate student at the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Primate Studies in the 1970s, where the research focus was on cognition, language, and inter-species communication between chimpanzees and humans, using American Sign Language. He quickly came to see the chimpanzees as friends rather than as research subjects. After several productive years, funding for the program was cut by the University, and the chimpanzee colony was sold to a medical research laboratory for invasive research. This led Robert to a crusade to free his chimpanzee friends that has lasted decades. Robert’s strong bond with Nim is explained in the 2011 award-winning documentary, Project Nim.

Dr Antonina Anna Scarnà (BSc. Hons, DPhil, PGCTHE, PGCert, CPsychol) is a psychologist and neuroscientist with expertise in language, personality and psychological disorders. Her previous work on the composition of the monolingual and bilingual lexicon explored the factors affecting object naming and reading. She conducted award-winning research into non-drug treatments for dopamine in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia at Oxford University UK, where she runs courses in Brain and Behaviour, Personality, and Psychological Disorders. Together with Robert Ingersoll, Anna published ’Primatology, Ethics & Trauma’ which evaluated the chimpanzee studies from the perspective of personality and trauma.