Discussion of Beryl Sandford's Article, A Patient and Her Cats

Received as “The Forum” went to press

Beryl Sandford's vivid and original essay leads us to clarify the relationship between the individual and the animal object, specifically the cat, the last tamed feline. The displacement towards the animal as a substitute object appears in a large range of situations going from totemism to bestialism.

In the case presented, the intense projective identification is of such outstanding significance that the problem is stated in terms of the possible psychosis of the cat itself or its receptiveness of and identifications with the projections of the patient's psychotic parts.

I fully agree with Mrs. Sandford that the specific animal choice is based not only on the historical relationship with cats in the patient's childhood, but more basically on the structure of the cat itself as an object able to receive in absolute independence the split-off parts of the patient as well as on the patient's incapacity for an adequate splitting and therefore integration of these parts.1

I had two important experiences with patients and their cats. The first was a women who had to interrupt her treatment because she was forced to settle in another country for a period of years. She then returned home and resumed her analysis. During the period she was away, an intense depressive process was reactivated. It was related to serious traumatic and surgical situations at a very early age which prevented her from working through the infantile depressive position and all separations in later life. In the country where she settled, she started a very intense relationship with a kitten which she brought home and reared when she was pregnant with her first child. This kitten became a substitute object representing her mother and her analyst, as well as her own parts identified with these objects. A year later a peculiar phenomenon occurred: the cat used to be in heat simultaneously with the menses of the patient. This was so obvious that, when the cat started its