Since the time when Aristotle was active ( one is speaking of a period covering almost 25 centuries ), knowledge of the realm of biological forms (animals in particular) has been acquired largely through "disinterested curiosity", that is to say violence, torture, mutilation and murder.
The extensive employment of such methodologies has always made biology something of an unsavory co-partner with medicine. Medicine, after all, is base on relief, and when possible, the cure from the very conditions that biologists produce in their quest for knowledge. The methods of observation of the science that provides the foundation for medicine are diametrically opposed to the aims of therapy.
Experimental science in the modern sense of the phrase dates from the 17th century. In 1616 William Harvey announced his discovery of the circulation of the blood based on the vivisection of many animals. In addition to defending the practice of vivisection by arguing that animals had no souls, Descartes spent much of his active career doing vivisections at his farm/laboratory/retreat in northern Holland. Descartes' own theories about the circulation of the blood were in error, (as were most of his scientific discoveries apart from analytic geometry).
Thus inaugurated, the tradition of the employment of cruel methods in biological and medical research continued in increased ferocity all through the 19th century. Among the most notable of its advocates was the eminent zoologist Claude Bernard, who, in 1865, wrote: "The science of life is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen."
Despite many efforts, including some by the greatest names in science (Darwin for example) to eliminate, curb or at least control the unfettered use of living animals in cruel experiments, the practice of doing so rose to a fever pitch in the 20th century and continues unabated today.
Whether one condemns or accepts these procedures as the order of the day, it should be clear to anyone that they cannot be successfully carried over to psychology, certainly not human psychology. It is inevitable that one of the effects on any scientist whose career entails a work-a-day immersion in systematic callousness towards living creatures, will be a numbing, even an anesthetizing of conscience. This may be mitigated in some persons, in theory at least, by their intention of seeking cures for major diseases. However, even with this rationale in mind, they are doomed to failure in the domain of human psychology.
I am not speaking, necessarily, about direct experimentation on human beings. What I am saying is that thousands of years of vivisection and other experiments with animals has numbed the awareness of scientists to the capacity for suffering in their objects of curiosity. When this tradition from biology is applied to psychology what is carried over is a mentality that thinks that human motivation can be reduced to mechanical models which don't take into account the motivations of their subjects, who in other words can be treated as machines.
The science of psychology sets up an "Observer/Observed" dilemma by doctor and patient, or researcher and subject, that operates on a far grander scale than the dilemma in particle physics covered by the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics. In point of fact, the Uncertainty Principle maintains control over the interference of the experimenter with the experiment with much greater effectiveness than the safeguards of standard psychology experiments such as 'double-blinds', recognition of conflict of interest, sophisticated statistical sampling and so on. Sense experience, the mainstay of the 'hard sciences' is a very imperfect guide, one that very often leads to wildly inaccurate assessments, in the observation of one person's psychological state by someone else.
Fortunately, human beings possess an additional sense organ that they are able to use in observing one another, one that needs to be profitably applied in biology and the other life sciences: I call it conscience. Applied to the observation of psychological phenomena, whether human or animal, "conscience" works in a manner very similar to that of sight for optics, sound for acoustics, taste and smell for chemistry, and all of these for physics. What I am calling the "sense organ" of conscience can actually see into the minds and hearts of others, a fact easily recognized by serious writers of fiction than it is far too many psychologists, particularly those who rely on raw uninterpreted observation, measuring instruments or the second-hand perusal of case histories.
Identifying conscience as a sense organ attuned to its corresponding sensory domain (that is to say the inner psychic reality of others) may appear somewhat strange at first, but its' use as a way of obtaining a form of scientific information can be witnessed in everyday experience. It is recognized by everyone that any description of the sequence of acts performed by an individual, combined with some kind of mathematical or statistical law that might be derivable from them, is, in and of itself, insufficient to correctly understand that individual. Understanding requires that one perceive, or at least intuit, the motivation behind those activities.
One cannot identify motivations on the basis of any list of the actions of anyone else. Either one empathizes directly with him, or one argues that, being a person constituted like oneself, I would only behave that way if I were motivated by this or that idea. The empathy, perception or intuition of the motivations behind the behavior of others is, in my v iew, akin to the operation of conscience as a sense organ. Motivation is recognized in law in judging the criminal or innocent intention of any act. It is this alone, quite apart from means and opportunity, that distinguishes a "crime" (or plea of innocence) from an agglomeration of accidental circumstances.
Because conscience has been relegated to the background in biology, (ceding place to the overwhelming pressure for uncovering new facts, only some of which will eventually contribute to knowledge), one should expect that the psychological medicine, or psychiatry, coming out of that tradition, will incorporate many aberrations, behaviorism, psycho-analysis, and the pill-popping that passes for therapy in the age of neuroleptic drugs and the DSM-IV.
For several centuries already, European science has been searching desperately for a psychology that may claim equal respect with physics and mathematics. It is only possible to do this, however, by eliminating conscience, motivation and intentionality, phenomena that physics and mathematics don't need to worry about.
As for direct psychological experimentation on human beings. although this is not my main focus in this article, there has been plenty of that. Among the most notorious examples is the hideous "research" funded by the CIA, of Ewan Cameron in Montreal during the 50's and 60's. Some of his methods and findings are being applied at this minute in Guantanamo. Most of the torture being done there is psychological. See Alfred W. McCoy, 2006: "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror. For information about Ewan Cameron see John Marks, 1991: "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate"