It cannot be disputed that Freud’s works are a zoological wonderland. Indeed, one might compare the Freudian corpus to a “nature reserve” in which creatures great and small, real and imagined (ants, apes, bats, bees, beetles, bulls, butterflies, caterpillars, cats, crayfish, dogs, donkeys, earwigs, emus, flies, foxes, frogs, giraffes, gnats, goats, herring, horses, jaguars, kangaroos, leeches, lizards, mice, moths, night-moths, oysters, porcupines, rats, ravens, scorpions, sheep, snails, snakes, starfish, tigers, toads, vultures, wasps, whales, wolves, worms, etc.) proliferate and run wild.

Freud often points to the kinship between humans and animals and to the continuity between “animal instincts” and the civilized mind. At the same time, Freud frequently corrals animals into his metapsychology. That is, it could be argued that animal examples (e.g., wolves, horses, cats, and dogs) do the lion’s share of the theoretical work when it comes to defining certain crucial concepts in psychoanalysis (e.g., primal scene, castration, narcissism, original repression)—concepts that, paradoxically, tell a story of human exceptionalism.

This presentation is on the hunt for animals that resist such conceptualization (continuity/discontinuity). And here we must not forget that Freud was an inveterate “dog person” and that real-life dogs— Jofi, the chow who would sit quietly, or not so quietly, at the foot of the couch while analysis was in session; Wolf, the German shepherd who once bit Ernest Jones much to Freud’s delight; Topsy, the eponymous hero of Marie Bonaparte’s book that Freud and Anna translated as the Nazis invaded Austria—dogged Freud’s every move, whether theoretical and otherwise. In brief, this presentation sets out to explore what it means for the father of psychoanalysis to have been an “animal person” both in theory and practice.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this presentation participants will be able to:

1. Describe the changing function of animal examples in psychoanalytic theory.
2. Explain the philosophical critique of Freud’s Oedipalization of animals.
3. Point to animal examples in Freud that exceed philosophical conceptualization.

Elizabeth Rottenberg, PhD

Elizabeth Rottenberg is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She teaches courses in the areas of contemporary French philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. She is also a practicing analyst in Chicago. Her most recent books are For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida (Fordham, 2019) and Derrida en jeu (PUM, 2023).

Shawn Thomson, RP, FIPA

Shawn Thomson is a psychoanalyst and psychodynamic psychotherapist working in private practice in Toronto and Prince Edward County. A former faculty member at York University in the Departments of Philosophy and Humanities, he now teaches at the TPS&I (in the FPP, ATPPP, and TIP). He also serves as a supervisor for ATPPP candidates and provides clinical consultation for therapists wishing to deepen their psychodynamic work.