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The title quote from 18-year-old Beatrix Potter's journal captures in its amusingly civilized description of wild beasts something of her complex relationship with animals. Central to the effect of Potter's tales is her talent at creating fluidity in the boundary between human and animal identities, a talent that flowed from her developmental experience of several jolts to her own identity while her deep connection to animals remained a lifelong constant.
Previous writers have demonstrated that Potter experienced and expressed in her tales many painful conflicts (Grinstein, 1995; Lane, 1946; Lear, 2007; Tuerk, 2020; Tutter, 2014) These aspects of her life and art can be understood within what Loewald (1951, 1952) identified as Freud's primary theory of ego and reality: that as the ego matures, it begins to recognize the dangerous separate reality into which it has been born and from which it must protect itself. My focus in this paper will be to explore an underlying aspect of Potter and her writings that can express such conflicts but is not explained by them: a fluidity between human and animal identities that has been suppressed in modern Western society but has been basic to most of humanity and is still available to young children, even in the West. This fluidity between human and non-human identities is more readily explained by what Loewald (1951, 1952) identified as Freud's implicit theory about the nature of reality—that ego and reality are one during the phase of primary narcissism and gradually separate from each other, entailing a primal relatedness.
Ego modulation of rage can be readily recognized in the title quote by the way that Potter describes the pachyderms
rampaging in the precise “Northern suburbs” and with the prim “quite frequently afflicted.” But this phrasing also achieves something else, a drawing together of animal and human natures. This will become clearer by examining the entire journal entry from which the sentence was extracted. Pott