Freud's animality.

Abstract

The animal nature of human beings has all but disappeared from psychoanalytic discourse. This reflects Freud's struggle with the issue of animality, which he at once repudiates, and simultaneously conceals at the core of human mental life. Freud's use of the terms "animal" and "man" constantly shifts as he attempts to employ them in key areas of analytic theory building, while also shifting his perspective along the way to consider the opposition, similarity and identity of these terms. This impedes attempts to find structure and coherence in Freud's view, which is almost liquid in its instability. For Freud what separates man from the animal world does not rely upon the evolutionary or anthropological arguments he makes, but on a process of identification and disidentification that consigns animality to "not-me" states in support of Oedipal resolution. Ultimately, his attempts to bind and tame human animality via Oedipality cannot contain that which was never separate and could never be separated from the human.