Although western abla feminists and their younger counterparts, second-wave feminists, have more or less successfully put the nail in Freud’s coffin, the good Viennese gentleman and his psychoanalytical theories are alive and well, prospering actually, in emerging nations. If you look carefully enough, one can see Sigmund along Istikal surveying middle-aged passers-by and, more particularly for the purposes of this article, hear his analysis on the administration of some public animal shelters.

Freud has talked long and extensively on the link between sexual repression and female hysteria and/or anxiety disorders. (So much so, that several of his finer points have been challenged by his successors—a good sign of a successful theory.) Freud’s thesis has been that societies which sexually repress individuals, particularly women, create neurasthenia and anxiety disorders.

Later day Freudians, such as Alice Miller*, have further argued that particular parenting styles—obsession with toilet training and corporal punishment—belong to narcissistic mothers and fathers who cannot see the child as an individual in its own right, deserving and requiring unconditional love. Such parents seek to control the child to fulfill their own unmet needs, thus ignoring, for example, a child’s behavior as age related or developmental. Such children, in turn, are denied control over their own bodies in a culture which holds cleanliness next to godliness, viewing natural healthy impulses and needs as chaotic forces needing to be repressed. By using techniques such as humiliation and shame, the parent controls the child (and thus his or her own particular demons) but at great cost to the child.

In the Drama of the Gifted Child, for example, Miller has argued that such parents ‘create’ high achieving kids but in failing to see the child for who s/he is, the ‘good’ mothers and fathers provide the recipe for adult unhappiness in all its charming forms–alcoholism, sexual dysfunction, depression, eating disorders, and neuroses. Miller has also taken institutionalized religion and authoritarian regimes to task: in For Your Own Good and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child, she has argued how child abuse has been accepted and excused by the Church; in Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, she examines the result of such ‘systematic’ parenting in the product of modern day horrors such as Adolph Hitler and Nicolae Ceausescu.

If, for the sake of argument, we apply the rough outlines of this scenario to the current administration of animal shelters, individuals like Asude Ustaoglu, we can see Doctors Freud and Miller busily scribbling notes on the patients perched on the barinak couch.

Lets Adopt has discussed the sociology of animal hoarding; we’d now like to promulgate the thesis that such behaviors need to be seen as animal abuse. Animal hoarding reflects much of the narcissistic tendencies that psychoanalysts have delineated: how under the guise of maternal ‘caring,’ animals are systemically abused and neglected—their real needs, as animals, not as surrogate children to relive their parents’ traumas, are erased; how citizens close their eyes to what they instinctively know to be abuse behind shelter gates.

Warehousing animals, ignoring our role as protectors in providing medical care such as neutering and sterilization, and, most importantly–giving immunity to unhealthy individuals to perpetuate and play out unresolved neuroses of their own, makes us all complicit in the cycle of abuse.

 Silence implies consent.

The Other: Pis Yahudi/Ermeni/Espanol

What would a psychoanalytic discussion about animals be without including the topic of sex? The West has willingly (almost too willingly in its love affair with itself) admitted how its sexual obsession with the East—how 18th and 19th century western cultural products such as novels and paintings depicting, let’s say, harems and seraglios reveal more about repressed western sexual fantasies than the silenced lives of the eunuchs and odalisques actually inhabiting those worlds. In other words, the works of Flaubert, Shelley, Goethe, Moore, even the later day Marguerites Yourcenar and Duras really depict their own homosexuality, sexual fantasies of domination and control displaced upon a ‘virgin; landscape exploited for their own needs. The ‘other’ is what social theorists such as Edward Said in Orientalism have correctly indicated is really the viewers themselves—their displacement of their own fantasies Uan unwitting subject. Like Said, Modder in The Jew in the Literature of England presents “Anti-Jewish feeling is here  proved to be a symptom of existing social ills.”

The Jew, the Armenian, the Mediterranean Italian or Spaniard becomes the convenient repository for the unacceptable, ‘darker’ human needs–bottled up sex and anger, for example. So, a Jew is not a Jew; a Spaniard is not a Spaniard’ but the litmus or Rorschach Inkblot test for a culture’s own anxiety about, maybe, sexuality and its expression. When we hear the words, Pis Yahudi/Ermeni/Espanol (and see the stones that come flying with it), what we are really seeing is the product of tyrannical parenting 50 years ago–that 1940’s or 50’s parent who emotionally blinded a child. That child, now a middle-aged individual, repeats the cycle of abuse, this time, upon the defenseless animals under their control.

Anyone exposing this unhealthy dynamic risks, besides a stone to the head, being labeled the Other— who must be marginalized and humiliated much in the same way the stone thrower was parented.

If the 20th century was the movement to reveal humanity’s abuse upon one another and tell the stories of silenced victims, perhaps the work of the 21st century belongs to reveal and reform our relationship with animals. Our growing concerns for our natural environment reflect an awakening awareness that animals require respect from caregivers and an acceptance–not denial– of their true needs.

Let’s get started.

Let’s Adopt.