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Seeking to build an objective scientific approach to psychiatry, American psychiatrists, physiologists, and psychologists began to turn to the conditional reflex method of Ivan Pavlov from the late 1920s. The generation of “neurotic” animals in the laboratory was critical to the emergence of a new experimental psychiatry in the United States. To understand the development of this field of research, the chapter will draw first on Mary Morgan’s identification of the mediatory and intermediary role of models and their ability to surprise and generate new questions, and second, upon her recent work on narratives in science. It will argue that it was through discursive and descriptive techniques that traced over time the tangled and interconnected lives of experimental subjects, that such elements of unpredictability in the animal laboratory were transformed into tools of research and put to disciplinary uses, promoting the clinical relevance of this new objective approach to psychiatric medicine.

How do top bureaucrats define, in their own words, their professional identity and the norms they work by? Do they define them in line with a Weberian ideal type of the bureaucrat and bureaucratic norms? Or rather by a modernised entrepreneurial ideal type, often associated with New Public Management reforms? Further, what can such self-presentations tell us about professional norms operating in top bureaucrats’ daily work, and about institutional or wider societal logics guiding the non-elected, administrative side of contemporary government? The top officials, the senior civil servants in central ministries, who take part in policy-making and serve the political leadership, have a specific role distinct from that of the politicians and are guided by professional norms. Scholars focusing on this level of top bureaucrats have described their professional norms as being about serving the elected politicians loyally, but also contributing technical and thematic expertise independent of political considerations and ensuring that policy is developed according to legal standards. This chapter investigates how top bureaucrats themselves define those norms and that role – is it in line with an ideal close to Weberian ideal type characteristics, or not?