ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a guided tour of the anguished, puzzling, scary, and, at times, darkly erotic mental zoo. It covers a large terrain of psychiatric symptomatology involving animals, stopping at the scenic spots of delusions and hallucinations; confusional states; lycanthropy; culture-bound psychiatric syndromes; obsessions and phobias; personality disorders; sexual perversions; and childhood psychiatric disorders. In societies where animals are in closer contact with humans, they are perhaps more readily drawn into the psyche as projective containers for unacceptable sexual impulses, sadomasochism, guilt, fear, and shame. Although fleeting concerns involving animals may appear in all types of anxiety reactions, the anxiety disorder par excellence involving animals is simple phobia. Psychiatric symptomatology involving animals is also found in association with personality disorders. “Bestiality,” or sexual contact with animals, usually occurs in association with predisposing cultural factors, lower levels of education, and schizoid tendencies. Animals also make their appearance in the course of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
