The Dog Who Barks and the Noise of the Human: Psychoanalysis After the Animal Turn

ABSTRACT

What would or could a psychoanalysis beyond the human be? And who—and how—might we who call ourselves human be or become in turn? In the “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” Freud (1916–1917) famously declared psychoanalysis to be the third great blow to human self-love delivered at the hands of science. First, the Copernican revolution revealed that the earth was not the center of the universe “but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness.” Then Darwin and his contemporaries undermined the ground upon which “the human” had asserted a fundamental difference from “the animal.” And now, psychological research has tripled down, giving “human megalomania” its “third and most wounding blow.” “The ego,” Freud wrote, “is not even master in its own house.” In passages like this, we get a glimpse of a psychoanalysis beyond the human–animal boundary. Nevertheless, the force of anthropocentrism returns again and again in Freud’s body of work, as when he consigned human animality to a prehistoric past or linked it to the baser instincts that human civilization needs to overcome. But what if, instead of running away from the animal in us, we were to dwell with and alongside the nonhuman? Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche and cultural theorist Nicholas Ray, this essay traces the sounds and scents of the nonhuman animal in and for psychoanalytic theory.

Notes

¹ Freud’s unalloyed commendation in this section of the protection the machinic offers “civilized” peoples is at odds with the ambivalence about progress expressed in the previous chapter of “Civilization and Its Discontents.” There, Freud ventriloquizes the mixed feelings that technological progress brings: “If there were no railway to make light of distances, my child would never have left home, and I should not need the telephone to hear his voice” (Freud, 1930, p. 88).

² Laplanche and Mitchell were writing about “gender” at the same moment, both seeking to distinguish it from sexual difference/anatomical differences of the sexes; both were also engaging with feminist debates over the sex/gender distinction. She was writing in English, he in French, neither apparently aware of the other’s writing. We might well wonder at the zeitgeist—the ambient transmissions—of this historical moment and its various intellectual and political crosscurrents.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ann Pellegrini

Ann Pellegrini, Ph.D., is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University (NYU). She served as Director of NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality from 2008 to 2017. Her books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race and Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (co-written with Janet R. Jakobsen). Her most recent book—“You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths About LGBT Life and People (co-written with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico)—was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Non-fiction. She co-edits the Sexual Cultures series at New York University Press and is a candidate in adult psychoanalysis at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City.