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MAN HAS ALWAYS BEEN FASCINATED BY THE CREATURES around him. At first, in the animistic and pantheistic religions, there was a tendency for all life to be seen as a unity, although in the Hebraic creation only Man is made in God's image. The domestication of animals for social reasons is very ancient, and archaeological evidence for the use of dogs as pets is already evidenced by pre-Neolithic, Mesolithic peoples (Zeuner, 1963). At present, over one-half of the families in the United States have pets.
There is an early psychoanalytic literature on the uses and intrapsychic meanings of animals, but then interest waned until recently when there has been an upsurge of medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic research on the impact of pets on humans.
In the psychoanalytic literature the two earliest descriptions of the treatment of children, Little Hans (Freud, 1909) and Little Chanticleer (Ferenczi, 1913), both involve youngsters who used animals (horses and fowl) as objects to which they had displaced their sexual interests leading to subsequent phobic fears. In academic psychology, Watson and Raynor (1920) used Little Albert to show how conditioning could cause animal fears. In 1913 Freud commented on the closeness children feel with animals when he stated, "Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals. Uninhibited as