Cultural Zoo: Animals In The Human Mind And Its Sublimation
by Salman Akhtar /
2014 / English / PDF
5.2 MB Download
'This book is a major contribution to culture and to the psychoanalytic literature. The authors explore how animals, both wild and domesticated, have powerful symbolic meanings in our psyches, mythology, religion, literature, art, music, and popular culture. From the prehistoric art of Lascaux to Picasso, from The Fly to the American eagle, the psychoanalytic perceptions are subtle and suggestive, the aesthetic, film, and national insights are a delight.'-Peter Loewenberg, Dean, Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, Professor of History and Political Psychology, UCLA'Our cousins - the animals - swarm, creep, fly, swim, and crawl all about us, even sharing our houses and infesting our bodies. We hunt them, breed, them, clothe ourselves with them, and eat them for dinner (as they sometimes do to us). They populate our literature, myths, religions, arts, our language and its metaphors, and they haunt our unconscious fantasies and our dreams.In this book, North American psychiatrists explore the psychic bond between humans and animals and its importance in the normal development of the human mind, animals in human dreams, transformations of humans to animals in literature, animals generally in adult and children's literature and art, animals in religion, and how animals relate to immigration and national identity.
