ABSTRACT
Bird-headed figures might also have represented some imagined journey to or from some faraway place such as a land of ancestors or guardian spirits or gods, or perhaps the realm of death. S. Freud was the first to explore the psychological association between sexual desire and birds. The repetitive, bloody, and futile attempts made by the victimized bird to alight on a branch serve up an awful metaphor for the fantasied fate of the guilt-ridden oedipal son at the hands of a sadistically retaliatory–and nearly psychotic–father-figure. A clear-cut case of birds’ entering into a patient’s psychotic state is found in Freud’s discussion of Judge Schreber’s memoir of his mental illness. For, the human aviary is as wide as earth and sky, as Homo aves, it cannot encompass the ever-stretching field that is the mind of patients caretaker and keeper-Homo aves-whose imagination is as boundless and timeless as Nature itself.
