This paper is about ‘nature’ and ‘animal’ as ‘others’, of—and within—psychoanalysis. As well as contributing to the introduction of critical dimensions to psychoanalytic work on environment, I hope to address what Theodore Roszak felt was an emphasis on sexuality to the detriment of ecology in the Freudian unconscious. In the latter part of the essay I will consider in particular the positions psychoanalysis explicitly and implicity acscribes to nonhumans. My focus here is largely confined to Freudian psychoanalysis, and the relations between the constructions of sexual difference and ‘the animal’ at the site of the ‘primal scene’ (Freud, 1918), I contend that the issues raised also apply to post-Freudian approaches, especially insofar as they rely on notions of a specifically human psyche characterised by primal phantasy, trauma and/or psychic splitting, or propose an originary conception of human nature. When ecological psychoanalysis or eco-psychology apply concepts and practices which are historically tied to dualistic constructs of nature, the animal and the human they risk reiterating the structures they seek to challenge. As Judith Butler points out, ‘The analysis that assumes nature to be singular and prediscursive cannot ask, what qualifies as ‘nature’ within a given cultural context, and for what purposes? Is the dualism necessary at all?' (1990, 1999 edn: 51).
What an eco-psychoanalysis that does not presume a distinction between the human and nonhuman might become remains to be seen, but some are already engaged in ecological psycho-therapies which challenge the boundaries that define regulated clinical space (Jordan, 2009, Totton, 2010). The question arises of the demarcation of the psychological clinic, of psychotherapeutic space; of the ‘frame’ itself as a specific site of exclusion of the nonhuman, which in the name of transference, mental health, safety, or public protection etc., can seen as
masking, in a Foucauldian sense, an exclusionary discursive operation. One can speculate that such a tactic may become increasingly unsustainable given the broader context of the multiple effects and interactions, including climatic of the interrelations of human and nonhuman.
Theodore Roszak was seen by many as an initiatory force in the field of ecopsychology. In 1994 he made a plea, at turns berating and flattering, to those he describes as ‘experts’ in the psychological field (1995: 3). He said that therapists were ejecting ‘ecological’ meanings from clinical material in favour of interpretative strategies relating to sexuality, relationships or familial histories. He sought to recruit the ‘authority’ and ‘influence’ of those engaged in the taking therapies (1995: 2), suggesting that their neglect of environmental concerns may signify more than simple oversight; that psychotherapy was itself implicated in defending, ‘the last ditch of industrial culture… the repression of the ecological unconscious’ (Roszak, 1995: 3).
Proposing that this repression, dividing us from the natural world is ‘deeper’ than those relating to sexuality, incest or aggression, Roszak urges those engaged in the talking therapies to participate in the development of, ‘an environmentally based definition of mental health’, to move beyond their ‘urban boundaries’, and, at the same time, to do something other than individualise, pathologise and isolate clients from the, ‘environmental ground of their being’ (1995: 2). He argues that the repression of the ‘more than human world’ turns it into something, ‘other, apart from … alien’, which is frequently characterised as a feminised mother nature or mother earth (1995: 3).
While Roszak is addressing the psychological professions in broad terms, he is also mounting a challenge to Freudian psychoanalysis at its heart by proposing that what is really unconscious has not yet been properly identified, and that the modern urban context of the psychoanalytic clinic has led to its being complicit in practices which damage the human and more than human worlds alike.
Of course Roszak is being thoroughly contradictory here, urging an end to pathologising practices while creating new categories of mental health—in fact a new mother-of-all-pathologies, beyond sexual repression—that
of ecological repression. It also seems a rather high risk strategy to deliver greater powers into the hands of those who rely on a theory that in Roszak's view has got the real basis of repression completely wrong.
Roszak has however given impetus to the development of ecopsychology as a field, and his notion that we suffer as a result of our separation from nature has in particular been taken forward by clinicians agreeing that we have become alienated from nature itself as well as from our own ‘real’ natures. Perhaps Roszak can be forgiven for not addressing the institutional context and history of the talking therapies which reveals its contradictory position, as Butler notes, as a site where norms can be either reinforced or challenged (1990, 1999: xxxiii). This is not after all a central concern to everyone already in the field. However reinforcing and expanding the position of the psychological practitioner as ‘expert’, might compromise the potential for resisting the very human supremacist position which Roszak believes has led humanity down its fateful path and is keen to critique.
Roszak's call on psychotherapists' expertise may hold particular appeal for those with environmentalist inclinations. However, if as he implies, psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge about ‘human nature’ is itself predicated on a notion of ‘the human’ that requires an implicit positing of an ‘other’ of nature, then I suggest it would be productive to question the basis of emerging ecological psychologies and environmentally oriented psycho practices. What has arisen so far appears largely to be an applied environmental psychoanalysis, which has been developed through the transposition onto culture of concepts embedded within various psychoanalytic or psychoanalytically derived clinical orientations. These give rise to narratives of denial, perversion and loss in relation to ‘the environment’, with scant attention given to the suitability of their inherent knowledge claims about nature and/or human nature. Recent work by Dodds (2010, 2012) and Jordan (2012) has however introduced a critical dimension and their contributions to an ecopsychology anthology, just out this year, comprising a section entitled ‘The View from Postmodernism’, is welcomed by the ecopsychologist editors as an important ‘self-questioning element’. (Rust, Totton, eds., 2012).
Recent, mainly British psychoanalytic work in this field takes forward Roszak's injunction to interpret clinical material in terms of our separation from ‘nature’, by utilising existing psychoanalytic conceptual frameworks and applying them to human response or lack of response to the threats posed by climate change, and includes works from Kleinian, Jungian, Attachment and Object Relations approaches. The notion of ‘nature’, and of ‘the environment’ however, while occupying the central positions within this psychoanalytic work, are not themselves currently a primary focus of critical enquiry—both human and nonhuman nature are frequently presented as pre-given known categories; indeed Roszak's suggestiveness regarding the cultural construction of ‘nature’—primarily in feminine terms, is often unheeded in both Jungian and Kleinian perspectives, where use of the notion ‘mother nature’, and as nature as ‘other’ than human are commonplace. For Rust, we are seeing ‘mother’ nature as destructive, and as that from which we have become fatefully separated (Rust, 2008). At times nature is portrayed as a source of nourishment, at others depleted, in need of succour (Randall, 2005).
‘Human nature’ is also implicitly and explicitly portrayed as a pre-given known, for example in relation to greed and destructivity (Weintrobe, 2010). Behaviours and attitudes identified as destructive to ‘the environment’ such as the addiction to consumption are seen as reducible to psychoanalytic categories of pathology e.g. greed, failure to mourn, and the notion of need for primary maternal attachment is extrapolated to our disturbed attachment relationship to ‘nature’ (Jordan, 2009). The point often overlooked is that a human culture that produces consuming, greedy, narcissistic, anthropocentric humans cannot be easily disentangled from the culture that produces psycho-pathologies, psychotherapies and the injunction to be psychologically healthy—now linked to that of being environmentally aware and responsible.
Hoggett, in seeking to explain denial of climate change, argues that that our whole culture is embedded with an instrumentalist mind-set which promotes climate change denying attitudes, and is now moving from being characterised by narcissism to perversion (Hoggett, 2009b,
conference paper). The main difference between Hoggett's psycho-social approach and other eco psychological/psychoanalytical perspectives is that the latter propose that psychic phenomena such as greed, envy and narcissism create cultural phenomena, whereas Hoggett argues that cultures can be characterised as a whole by psychoanalytic concepts, and that western culture is in transition from one pathological condition to another. He wants to use psychoanalytic concepts in the pursuit of establishing a whole new set of classificatory environmentalpsycho-social pathologies focussed especially on denial of climate change. The purpose of the first UK conference on the subject of psychological and psychosocial theorising of climate denial in 2009 was to:
Examine denial from a variety of different perspectives—as the product of addiction to consumption, as the outcome of diffusion of responsibility… and as the consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency, irresponsibility.' (Hoggett, 2009a, publicity extract)
Ecopsychologist Sandra White, on the other hand, argues that denial, rather than being pathological is a necessary and ‘innate’ aspect of human nature, and that a wider cultural narrative with visions of ‘sustainability’ needs to be created. (White, 2009: 3-4).
This is a developing, diverse and mobile field within which, as noted above, critical perspectives are beginning to emerge. While this body of work is far from heterogeneous, it appears to have prompted a significant level of cross orientation dialogue including conferences (Facing Climate Change, UWE March 2009, Engaging with Climate Change, Institute of Psychoanalysis October 2010), websites, (see especially ) as well the anthology Vital Signs (2012) mentioned above. One can speculate that the divisions that have characterised the history of psychoanalysis have, in this area at least, become weakened by a sense of urgency and common commitment in terms of climate activism.
The fraught question of the applicability of the clinic as regards these kinds of cultural applications deserves specific and detailed attention, which I am unable to fully pursue here. However it is important to
note that the use of psychoanalytic concepts such as perversion arose within specific historical and clinical contexts, and as regards that particular example, the perverse is, at least in Freud's view an aspect of libidinality which should not be used as a term of reproach (Freud, 1905:160). When applied uncritically, even in the service of instigating psycho-social attitudinal shifts in relation to climate or environment, perhaps some of these transpositions run the risk of stretching the psychoanalytic clinic farther than its structures will bear.
In terms of clinical practice there is some interesting ‘out of doors’ work taking place, about which little is written, (exceptions are Jordan & Marshall 2010, Key & Kerr 2012) including on a one-to-one basis. The lack of inclination to describe or propose new forms of eco-practice might have something to do with their challenge to the traditional conception of clinical space—the indoors psycho-physical place in which analysis or therapy happens; the whole heterotopic psychoanalytic frame, hitherto viewed largely as an inviolable essential prerequisite. This starts to break down once the concept of the ‘the environment’ as something beyond or outer to the human is brought into question, along with, as Nick Totton has noted the structural and hallowed notion of ‘boundaries’ (Totton, 2010). Their discursive position in relation to power embedded in the structures of the clinic, its regulation and alleged ‘safeguarding’ role, may be subject to revision or reversal if ecological psycho-practices undermine traditional clinical settings. After all it is more than 25 years since Donna Haraway, as usual ahead of her time, wrote in a footnote to A Manifesto for Cyborgs that it was time to write, ‘The death of the clinic… our dominations don't work by medicalisation and normalisation anymore… Foucault's Birth of the Clinic, History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish name a form of power at the moment of its implosion’ (Haraway, 2004: 11).
So while ecopsychology has not preoccupied itself with questions about what is meant by the idea of ‘nature’ in discourses of ecology and environmentalism, these have increasingly become subject to critical attention from environmentally oriented work in the humanities, some of which is psychoanalytically inflected (Morton, 2007 2010a,
2010b; Mortimer-Sandilands, 2010;). Slavoj Žižek has taken up the critique of the idea of ‘nature’ proposed by Morton (2007) and used it to extend the proposition that the symbolic big Other does not exist, to include the big Other of nature: ‘The first premise of a truly radical ecology should be, nature doesn't exist… [W]hat we need is ecology without nature, ecology that accepts this open, imbalanced, denaturalised if you want, character of nature itself’ (Žižek, Athens talk, 3/10/2007).
Morton says that our fantasmic conceptions of nature are preventing us from ‘thinking ecologically’ and that the point at which the divide between the human and the non-human is recognised as illusory, is when ‘nature’ as a separate category ceases to exist (Morton, 2007, 2010a). Conceiving of nature as ideal prevents ecological thought because the construction of nature as ‘other’ prevents us from dealing with the complex and multiplying effects, including climatic, of the interrelatedness of life forms (Morton, 2010b: 274-5). This position operates on the level of a critique of much ecopsychology to date, because any idealisation of nature reinforces rather than undermines anthropocentrism.
This also matters for psychoanalysis, since at its heart, this is a critique of the integrity of human subjectivity, which comes into being only in relation to the fantasmic separate other of nature. Following Judith Butler's conception of ‘heterosexual melancholy’, Morton speculates that subjectivity is structured by unimaginable and ungrievable loss because the environment actually is that from which we can never be separate. Referring to ‘ecological lament’ he suggests that if melancholia is an irreducible feature of subjectivity, then environmental melancholia represents a kind of ‘dark ecology’, saturated with unrequited longing for that we never had (Morton, 2007:186).
Cate Mortimer Sandilands also draws on Butlerian notions of foreclosed melancholy, and like Morton, proposes a meeting of queer theory and ecology. She emphasises a conception of melancholia which holds precious traces of separations and losses, and can form the basis of an ongoing psycho-political ecological practice (Sandilands, 2010: 334-340).
She connects ‘nature-nostalgia’ with eco consumerist behaviors such as, ‘ecotourist pilgrimages to endangered wildernesses, documentaries
about dying places and even environmental campaigns as being expressive of ‘melancholy nature’ which actually ‘incorporate environmental destruction into the workings of commodity capitalism’ (Mortimer-Sandilands, 2010: 333). She proposes that mourning itself has become subject to commodification—in the form of ‘lost nature’ usually construed as mythic or idyllic. Nature becomes more than a fantasy; it is a scopic fetish that keeps ‘consumers poised to watch’ (Mortimer-Sandilands, 2010: 337-8).
Sandilands, in contrast to many ecopsychological authors, does not see melancholia as representing failure to mourn, in terms of incompletion or a pathology; instead of emphasising the necessity of mourning in order to move beyond grief, she argues that through our recognition of the persistence of past identificatory losses, an ethical relation to the present can be formed. She connects heteronormative and anthropocentric psychic structuring, implying that sexual identification and human identification are bound together and foreclosed together. She draws on Butler's use of Freud's Mourning and Melancholia, as well as Freud's paper, On Transience, to elaborate her perspective that human cultural contexts lack possibilities for acknowledging loss in relation to non-human beings, natural environments and ecological processes, so ‘the disavowed objects are preserved within the psyche in the form of identifications and incorporations’ (Mortimer-Sandilands, 2010: 334-6). In the spirit of queer theory's subversion of what might be construed as pathologising psychoanalytic notions, she suggests that unacknowledged environmental loss can also potentially become recognisable and meaningful if melancholia is embraced. Using Butler's later account of what constitutes a ‘grievable life’, Sandilands proposes that melancholic attachment can become a permission to keep the lost beloved close, to follow the tracks and traces, to engage in commemorative practices, the present being not only haunted by the past but ‘constituted’ from its ‘ruins and rejections’ (Mortimer-Sandilands, 2010: 340).
The trajectories of Tim Morton's proposal for queer ecology are dense with speculations and collisions as he traverses philosophical, ecological scientific and aesthetic terrain. Considering the nature of a meeting between ecological criticism and queer theory, he conjectures that while they appear incompatible, ‘if they met there would be a fantstic
explosion.’, and asks, ‘How shall we accomplish this perverse Frankensteinian meme splice?’ (Morton, 2010b: 273).
The contrast could hardly be more stark between a psycho-social psychoanalysis which seeks to theorise a perverse pathological culture of climate denial, and this positively celebratory argument for the virtues of perversity in the combustive embrace of queer theory and ecology.
Morton suggests here that queer ecology will abandon the ‘disastrous’ term ‘animal’, and ‘worry away at the boundary between human and non-human’, not only because the idea of ‘the animal’ presumes erroneously a clear distinction at the boundary of what is and isn't life—a boundary that is ‘thick and full of paradoxical entities’, but also because ecology:
Humiliates… the human and spawns… politicized intimacy with other beings… an intimacy well described by queer theory when it argues that sexuality has never been a case of norm versus its pathological variants. Such intimacy necessitates thinking and practicing weakness rather than mastery, fragmentariness rather than holism. (Morton, 2010b: 276-278)
It is particularly on the question of the relation of psychoanalysis to the notion of ‘the animal’ that I now wish to concentrate: perhaps the figure of ‘the animal’ haunts psychoanalysis even more than the other of ‘nature’ itself. My focus here will be primarily on the animal in Freud and Lacan, which is not to imply that Fruedo-Lacanian psychoanalysis is distinctive in this regard; the implicit re-iteration of the primacy of the human is ubiquitous in psychologising theory.
If the boundary between the human and non human, between human and animal disappears, then what are the implications for psychoanalysis—and for any psychoanalytic ecology? Given that psychoanalysis developed from the position of positing a radical distinction between human and animal subjectivities—or even that the difference between ‘us and them’ is that animals don't have subjectivities
at all, it seems that these may be far-reaching theoretically and clinically, that is if one even can continue to speak of ‘the clinic’ in this context anymore.
Jacques Derrida, in his appraisal of the use of the notion of the animal, including within psychoanalysis, suggests that Lacan locates, and in a sense, relegates and defines the animal in relation to the order of the imaginary—by positing an exclusively human symbolic. He says that Lacan ‘confirms and compounds’ a ‘radical discontinuity’ between the animal and the human by presuming certain qualities as being exclusively human, which are thereby refused to the animal—including speech, associated with animals not having an unconscious, having not ‘fallen prey’ to language, as well as their lacking awareness of death, mourning, culture, lying, guilt, laughter crying (Derrida, 2008: 134-5). Derrida questions the basis of any assumption of ‘right’ for the human to ascribe such qualities exclusively to himself, defining himself in terms of that which the animal is not allowed, and argues that the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic which is derived from such an assumption, is significant in its underwriting of:
This whole anthropocentric reinstitution of the superiority of the human order over the animal order, of the law over the living etc., wherever such a subtle form of phallogocentrism seems, in its way, to testify to the panic Freud spoke of: the wounded reaction not to humanity's first trauma, the Copernican (the earth revolves around the sun), nor its third trauma—the Freudian, (the de-centring of consciousness under the gaze of the unconscious) but rather to its second trauma, the Darwinian). (Derrida, 2008: 136)
Paradoxically, and in some way terrifyingly it is precisely the lack intrinsic to the human assumption of the symbolic order that is the cause of the presumption of a position of superiority in relation to the animal who becomes, as a consequence, according to Derrida the scapegoat for what is lacking in the human. What the animal lacks, ‘is precisely the lack by virtue of which the human becomes subject of the signifier…to be subject of the signifier is also to be a subjecting subject, subject as master’ (Derrida, 2008: 130). He does, however, leave the door open for
qualification on Lacan's position, saying that he is not seeking here to mount an attack on Lacanian discourse as a whole and must leave aside whether, later, as the distinction between imaginary and symbolic became less important in Lacan work, ‘the armature of this logic came to be explicitly re-examined’ (Derrida, 2008: 132).
This construction of psychoanalysis as a site for re-iteration of human superiority in relation to non-human others can however be seen in Freudian theory and the psychoanalytic clinic prior to Lacan. Animal phobias were a significant feature in Freud's case histories (1909, 1918), and Freud's oedipal interpretation of these were part of the claim of psychoanalysis to comprehend the truth of ‘human nature’, through the positing of an animal ‘other’, whose being is characterised by a not being subject to a prohibition on incest. However, as Genosko notes, Freud was also aware that children identify strongly with animals in terms of their being seen as ‘full equals’; human and nonhuman natures are not rigidly demarcated, and this non-phobic relation was considered normal by Freud (Genosko, 1993: 610). This notion of the human animal in psychoanalysis is often implied or mediated through a troubled and highly prevalent use of the notion of ‘the primitive’, including in Totem and Taboo where Freud describes aboriginals as savages, closer to ‘prehistoric’ man (1913: 2).
Unsurprisingly therefore, the notion of primitivity has been subject to critique in terms of its proposition that non-Western cultures are associated with the ‘primitive’, thus being implicated in the advancement of colonial ideologies of civilisation and Western cultural superiority (e.g. Brickman, 2003).
The term ‘primitive’ is much more commonly used in psychoanalysis than the term ‘animal’, and extends into Kleinian and Lacanian theory. This extensive use of the notion of primitivity arguably obscures the extent of reliance in psychoanalysis of the distinction between human and animal by positing a category that is not fully either. Primitivity is often seen to lie at a pre-human, post-animal juncture and refers to a kind of nascent, human ‘yet to become’, located in pre (western) cultural historical notions of human becoming, which in Totem and Taboo are identified with a lack of religious or social institutions, the place of which is taken by totemism, usually in the form of a sacred totem animal (Freud, 1913: 2). In the following decades Melanie Klein also
began to make extensive use of the notion, associating primtivity with her theorisation of primal intra-psychic and archaic infantile phantasies (e.g. Klein: 1926, 1932).
Lacan, whose formulation of the order of the real emerges form his study of the repression of the repressed (foreclosure) in the case of the Wolf Man, refers to the primitive extensively when discussing the case in Seminar I (Lacan, 1988). He identifies a ‘primitively’ constituted real, ‘a sort of immediate external world… an initial nucleus of the repressed’, unacknowledged, unformulated and unsymbolised, ‘as if it didn't exist… it is the centre of attraction, calling up all the subsequent repressions’ (Lacan, 1988: 43).
There is no direct association here by Lacan of the immediate external real world, beyond symbolisation, and a nonhuman or animal experience—such an association would be speculative, and arguably quite impossible, in the sense that we cannot conceive of or know about differences between ‘reals’ of species.
In Freud's famous case study often referred to as The Wolf Man, the primal scene which became central to psychoanalysis both theoretically and clinically, is derived by Freud from his interpretation of the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff)'s frightening dream of white wolves sitting in a walnut tree (Freud, 1918). It is through the primal scene that the Freudian oedipal crisis is both constructed and re-iterated, the time and place—though crucially these are often separated, where the traumatic realisation of sexual difference initiates the castration complex—which then does its work of bringing into being the human social subject. In Totem and Taboo Freud suggested that animal phobias substitute for the father in the context of the Oedipus complex, (1913: 130). Both animal phobias and totemism are produced by phylo and ontogenetic complexes but, as Genosko notes, ‘the moral remains the same: animals are sign vehicles for the expression of the male child's… relations with the father’, (1993: 608). By connecting totemism with animal phobias and the Oedipus complex, he suggests that Freud was able to link the phylogenetic level of the primal father with the ontogenetic of the Wolf Man's relationship with his actual father. (Genosko, 1993: 609).
I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again. (Freud, 1918: 29)
Pankejeff's dream wolves are essentially reduced by Freud to a foil, for a series of symbolic manoeuvres, highly imaginative in their own right, through which the primal scene, pre-dating the dream by two and a half years is retrospectively constructed, along with the enduring Freudian tale of desire and repression in the human. The wolves' gaze and their high position upon the tree signify the boy's scopophillic gaze at the site of the primal scene, the motionlessness of the wolves represents a reversal of the agitation of the witnessed parental copulation, their whiteness—the visible white underwear and sheets from the parent's bed, and their bushy tails—associated to two fairy tails in which a wolf loses his tail—are compensations for the reality of castration (Freud, 1918:30–38).
Ned Lukacher suggests that the Wolf Man case marks a moment in the history of psychoanalysis where a separation between the theoretical and clinical occurred. He likens Freud here to a kind of ‘psychical anthropologist’, who gets himself entangled in his own radical repudiation
leading him to assume that the Wolf Man understood in his dream that women are castrated (Lukacher, 1986: 150-2).
Lukacher seems to locate Freud's foreclosure in terms of the latter's wish to believe in the reality of the primal scene for the sake of political expediency in the face of his conflict with Jung and Adler (Lukacher, 1986: 139-40, 150). However there may be a more complex explanation. Through his repeated referencing of the sexual act as a form of animality, including the boy having seen animals having sex and having seen his parents having sex in the manner of animals, ‘more ferarum’ (1918: 41), Freud is positing the idea that the scopic human witness is subject to inassimilable trauma by being simultaneously unable to distinguish his copulating human parents from animals, and having the sight of the ‘real’ of sexual difference. This requires the retrospective construction of the primal scene to explicate the division between humanity and animality through the incest taboo and the castration complex, and the transition from the phylogenetic to ontogenetic.
It can be argued, following Foucault, that the Freudian psychoanalytic project represents the discursive shift in the location of ‘the animal’ in relation to human madness, whereby madness, formerly defined in terms of the embodying of animality itself, (Foucault, 1964, 2001 edn: 69) came to be, after the encounter with the phobic real of the animal and/or real of (animal) sex, defined in terms of differentiation; the instigation of the real of human sexual difference signifying the coming into being of the human as both neurotically structured and sexually heteronormative, through the ejection of, and demarcation from, the animal.
In the second volume of their anti-oedipal critique, Deleuze and Guattari in a chapter on the Wolf Man case entitled, ‘1914: One or Several Wolves’, mount a scathing attack on Freud's interpretive trajectory:
That day the wolf man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by, then filling the void with associations. He knew that Freud knew nothing about wolves… (Deleuze & Guattari, 1982:43)
They assert that Freud had already determined that animals could be
assumed to signify ‘the parental sexual scene’ and, in making their case for the intrinsic anthropocentrism of Freudian psychoanalysis, they argue that Freud overlooked the ‘non sentimental anti-oedipal hybrid’ that the dream wolves represented and in doing so failed to recognise the ‘becoming animal’ of his analysand. They argue that his obsession with establishing the law of the castrating oedipal father prevented Freud from developing a ‘truly zoological vision’ in which the there is a recognition of non-human multiplicities, of the pack as a form.
Donna Haraway objects to Deleuze & Guattari's emphasis on the pack, because, she says, it actually excludes the real multiplicities of human-animal interrelatedness through an emphasis on the wild. For Haraway this position is masculinist, revealed through a denigration of the domestic and derogatory descriptions of pets, including Freud's own ‘bow-wows’ (Haraway, 2008: 28-30). Gary Genosko echoes Haraway's concerns that Deleuze and Guattari ‘debase domesticates’ (Genosko, 1993: 617), suggesting they erroneously suppose that there are clear boundary categories between pets, hunting packs, hunted packs—as well as the varieties of pack formations, such as hunting pairs and lone wolves.
Of course these particular wolves are on one level a human production, a human account of a human dream. Yet at the same time they can be seen as the product of a complex interrelationship between human and wolf, in the context of a childhood in rural late Imperial Russia. Pankejeff refers to the area where he grew up as ‘wolf country’, with wolves being hunted annually, (Genosko, 1993:616) and according to Genosko he is likely to have witnessed the practice of hanging wolf corpses in trees (1993:613), presumably in order to deter livestock predation.
The context of late nineteenth century Russian childhood is extensively explored by Catriona Kelly who, in a beautiful ethnographic piece, ‘A Wolf in the Nursery’ (Kelly, 2007), documents multiple cultural significances for each feature of the dream which go far beyond that of persecutor and victim. She writes that there is in the wolf folklore of the time:
A primary sense of the uncanny—the wolf could pass as easily into domestic space as they could into the underworld. Indeed, they could cross the divide not just into human territory, but into human identity (my italics)… being magically able to slip from one species to the other, often by recourse to the aid of a tree or bush. (Kelly, 2007)
White wolves, in their unnaturalness, would be likely still more to evoke otherworldly associations, particularly given that white was the established colour of mourning. She argues that the stationary gaze of the wolves also fits with a folk association of the wolfs status as arbiter of morality with capacity to punish wrong doing. She suggests the bushy tail is particularly germane given the Russian saying, ‘there is no such thing as a wolf with a fox's tail’,—the wolves in the dream thus being the ‘proverbial impostors’ (Kelly, 2007).1 Highlighting ‘the boundary-crossing’ character of the wolf, who could be approached directly and placated, she cites the belief that, ‘If you speak to wolves nicely, they won't touch you—they'll turn off the path and pass by on one side’. For Kelly, Freud's interpretation produces for both dreamer and gazing wolves an endless silent disapproval, because there is no articulation of the moral position of the wolf.
Kelly's identification of wolf as a boundary crossing figure suggestive of cultural-psychic wolf-human hybridization puts one in mind of Donna Haraway's late twentieth century post-industrial hybridized cyborg (Haraway, 1985), as well as her recent work on companion species and human-animal interrelatedness (Haraway, 2003, 2008).
Haraway is concerned with the boundaries, and boundary crossings between species, between physical and nonphysical worlds, between virtual and non-virtual. She emphasises animals as subjects, as those who ‘look back’. She says that animals,
‘Through our ideologically loaded narratives of lives, hail us, (following Althusser's notion of interpellation), to account for the regimes in which we and they must live. We ‘hail’ them into our constructs of nature and culture, with major consequences of life and death, health and illness,
Page 36longevity and extinction.' (Haraway, 2008: 278)
After reading Freud's painstaking interpretive account, Sergei Pankejeff's dream wolves seemed rather denuded of their striking uncanny gaze, their otherworldliness so thoroughly mapped onto the oedipal schema. However the fascination in which they have been held for nearly 100 years suggests that they continue to resist interpretation. While for the young Sergei this was a dream of phobia and terror it had seemed, at least to this reader to be a dream of pleasurable magic, of uncanny wonder. The uncanny of course contains both terror and enjoyment, the most enjoyably uncanny moment being the ‘only piece of action’ in the dream - the windows opening of their own accord - to reveal, outside sitting upon a walnut tree the 6 or 7 (or 5 in the drawing), stationary white wolves, intently looking in (looking back?). Freud was presumably cognisant of the uncanny character of the dream, given the publication of his essay on the subject the following year and his references to Sergei Pankejeff's uncanny experiences in relation to horses and butterflies. However Freud prefers to keep his aesthetic speculations regarding the uncanny and his highly structured case for the position of the primal scene at the centre of clinical psychoanalysis quite separate. In 1919 in the introduction to The Uncanny, Freud professes himself to be largely (though not entirely) immune to the effects of the uncanny which suggests that may well have perceived himself immune to the uncanny effects of the wolves and animal others in his earlier case histories (Freud, 1919: 220).
Sergei Pankejeff's primary association to the dream was to a most uncanny human—wolf hybrid, a terrifying storybook image of an upright striding wolf, with pricked up ears and outstretched claws, whom the boy believed could devour him. The image of the ravenous wolf on two legs is surely a cannibalistic reference, as Freud notes, probably from Little Red Riding Hood (1918: 30). In Totem and Taboo, Freud connects the sensation of the uncanny with that which is taboo, perhaps explaining the combination of horror, anxiety and pleasure that the uncanny can provoke (1913:18). As Royle notes in his study of the uncanny,
Freud here also ‘inscribes cannibalism at the origin of human history’ through his proposing that the eating of the killed or murdered father led to an identificatory incorporation which is subsequently represented by the ‘totem meal’, which acts as both repetition and commemoration of the ‘criminal’ deed (Royle, 2003: 207). Royle argues that rather than being a theory of sexuality, psychoanalysis is, ‘first and foremost (foremost and hindmost, or perhaps hindforemost) a theory of cannibalism’ (2003: 206).
In The Future of an Illusion Freud suggests that cannibalism, while prohibited, has not necessarily been entirely overcome, ‘Cannibalism alone (of the older instinctual wishes) seems to be universally proscribed and—to the non-psychoanalytic view—to have been completely surmounted’ (1927: 11). Further, he goes on to suggest that, ‘It is possible that cultural developments lie ahead of us in which the satisfaction of yet other wishes, which are entirely permissible today, will appear just as unacceptable as cannibalism does now’ (Freud, 1927: 11).
It is striking both that Freud suggests that from a psychoanalytic viewpoint cannibalism has not been entirely overcome, and also that he speculates that taboos are culturally produced and thus that new taboos may yet emerge—one wonders what he might have had in mind when referring to a possible new prohibition that could be as unacceptable as cannibalism.
However in the previous decade, despite the multiple associations to devouring and cannibalism in the text of History of an Infantile Neurosis, Freud orients his interpretations around the incest taboo, which leaves intact and unexamined the demarcation between human and animal. The notion of cannibalism and its status as ultimate taboo also of course separates human from animal in that animals are here too perceived to be those specifically not subject to the taboo. But it functions differently from the incest taboo because there is a transgressive construction for humans, of both sex with family members and with animals; with the eating taboo the abstention relates only to the non consumption of the human other as food. If one brings the distinction between human and animal into question as Derrida and Haraway do, then the status of ‘the cannibal’, (or the human status as cannibal), is once again at issue. Indeed one could say humans are also, and already, uncanny in their cannibalism specifically in the aspect of uncanniness
that represents a covering over, a masking or disavowal in relation to the mass manufacture of living others in order that we may eat them. Derrida, implying that everyone really knows this to be so, writes:
The category of the animal is (more than) a sin against original thinking, vigilance, lucidity or empirical authority; it is also a crime. Not against animality precisely, but a crime of the first order against the animals, against animals… no one can deny this event anymore, no one can deny the unprecedented proportions of the subjection of the animal… Everybody knows what terrifying and intolerable pictures a realist painting could give to the industrial mechanical chemical hormonal and genetic violence to which man has been submitting animal life for the past two centuries. (Derrida, 2008: 26)
In giving the appearance—the rendition—of the animal other as killable and eatable, we reiterate our human status as non-cannibalistic. This is what Haraway, following Derrida closely, calls ‘the logic of sacrifice’ (Haraway, 2008: 78). Only a human can be murdered and it is seen as a moral outrage to degrade the human to the level of the ‘killable’; we call this ‘genocide’ and conceive of it as a loss of our humanity. But for Haraway humanity itself is being constructed through the exclusion of the suffering of animal others. ‘Within the logic of sacrifice’ animals are killed and then ingested symbolically. They become the substitute, the scapegoat, the other who saves us from patricide, fratricide and cannibalism. (Haraway, 2008: 79).
While Derrida and Haraway are embarking on a thoroughgoing critique of the human constructions and consumptions of the animal other, there is also a supplementing of the Freudian conception of the totemic founding of human culture, with a narrative of the human as a being whose re-constitution is tied to an ongoing substitutive animal construction and sacrifice. Psychoanalysis here is embedded in an exclusionary discourse of the specifically human, built on the fabrication of human/animal difference, overwritten by the Freudian trauma of sexual difference. The difference between human and animal relies on a conception of human as more than just a ‘species’ and of animal as a
grouped collective of species defined solely in terms of their not being human. And this in a sense also gives substance to Roszak's suggestion of a further ecological repression within or beyond the Freudian primal scene, in which one could speculate that the difference between sexual difference and animal difference may disappear. The question of the implications of such a critique for the contexts in which psychoanalysis and eco-psychologies are practiced has, at this time, scarcely begun to be considered.
Kelly explains this as follows, ‘they represent both the terrifying force of the Wood Tsar's gaze, and the wolves who are to be driven from the herd because they are not wolves at all. Such wolves—not just impostors, but inept impostors—take on another traditional attribute of the wolf in folklore. In traditional tales, particularly, the wolf is often the fall guy, the foil to the ever sharp-witted vixen. In the traditional version of the story about the wolf fishing with his tail that Pankeev knew, it was the vixen who persuaded him to try out this silly version of fishing; in other stories, the vixen gobbled up the wolf (and other animals) after having lured them into a trap’ (Kelly, 2007).