ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses such self-dialogues, in giving an account of a pet therapy program begun in 1981 at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. The therapeutic situations just described, as the reader was no doubt aware, were a parody of the Freudian and Kohutian psychoanalytic traditions. The theoretical framework is not the Freudian model, but one drawn from the American social-psychological tradition of Charles Horton Cooley, James Mark Baldwin, George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, and others. In viewing the person-pet interactions as therapeutic self-dialogues, some themes emerge. The ability to develop a 'favorite"; to single out, identify with, and maintain a relationship with a cat for some period of time may be both an indicator of a patient's capacity for social interaction. The heart of the psyche in the Freudian model is the Oedipal family, that inner symbol which represents the state of one's balance between unconscious impulses and outer reality.
