ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the people relationship to animals, reviews psychoanalytic background relevant to understanding the relationship of dreamers to the animal in themselves. It also reviews Sigmund Freud's animal symbols in dreams and his use of them and discusses a series of complex animal dreams, in which a patient worked through archaic conflicts using animal imagery, speculating upon why animal images were chosen. In some of the ancient dream books, animals are commonly divided into tame and wild, and represent controlled or uncontrolled instincts, or events. The relationship to animals also changes as religion, the ordering of ultimate meaning, changes. It would seem that the conscious idealizations of animals would lead to the appearance of many positive animal symbols in dreams. One suspects that in more Freudian or mainstream analyses of neurotic patients, animals more frequently tend to emerge as dysphoric because the dreamer is preparing to face those animal instincts that he has warded off.
