Trauma in Sentient Beings Nature, Nurture and Nim

Nim’s Family Tree

Introduction

1. Who Do You Think You Are?
- Chimpanzees have personalities. A focus on Nim
- Humans have personalities
- What makes humans? What makes chimps? Identity
- Personality scales, lineage, genetics, brain scans, biology
- Nim and his family (first degree relatives)

2. Personality
- How do you measure yourself?
- There are four ways in which we can measure the self: brain scanning, personality scales, family trees and studies of family lines, genetic analysis
- Nim’s characteristics: analysis upon character retrospectively
- Physical aspects of being: the body, objectification, self-objectification, grooming
- Bodily ownership and duality. Is your mind what your brain “does”?
- Chimpanzees and humans: same personality or “chimpanality” traits?
- Male vs. female brains, autism, sex and gender
- Alyse Moore and Lilly
- Anthropomorphising of animals: human arrogance at assuming primates to be humanlike

3. We’re In Here Because You’re Not All There: Captivity
- Humans’ need for a healthy upbringing
- The needs of a chimpanzee
- Washoe in her enclosure, existing not living, and self efficacy in humans
- Survivors: The effects of trauma on the brain in humans: the Romanian orphanages and the Holocaust
- “Man is the master of animals”: the morality behind the authoritarian model over chimpanzees

4. Overfamiliar
- Family Structures.
- Parental duties: What do good parents do?
- Confusion of bonds in humans
- Animal-to-animal bond in captivity. Irene Pepperberg and ALEX
- Parental narcissism in humans and in chimpanzees: a sense of self worth, parental neglect, and chimpanzee trust

5. Relationship Formation and Maintenance
- Relationship formation in humans
- Attachment, family, relationship formation and maintenance.
- Sternberg’s theory of love (1986), Trivers’ parental investment theory (1971)
- Romantic relationship formation in humans: arranged marriages, internet dating.
- Chimpanzees’ love relationships, the confusion of bonds in the Oklahoma chimpanzees
- The impact of captivity is maladaptive bonding
- Relationship breakdown: Duck’s model of relationship dissolution (1998) and Lee (1984).
- Out of sight, out of mind? Or ‘til death us do part? Partner death and grief experiences.

6. Inheritance: Reconnection with a Dying Planet
- How do we look to the future?
- How not to repeat history. Existing models of good practice.
- How to honour the memory of those past/passed.
- How to honour the memory of Nim and the other Oklahoma chimpanzees.

Biography

Antonina Anna Scarnà, BSc. Hons, DPhil, PGCTHE, PGCert, CPsychol, is a psychologist and neuroscientist with expertise in language, personality and psychological disorders. Her 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 and Trauma which evaluated the chimpanzee studies from the perspective of personality and trauma.

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.