ABSTRACT
In experiments conducted as long as twenty years ago, the German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler tried to sketch the struc-ture of the chimpanzee’s universe. He rightly observed that the originality of the animal world will remain hidden to us for as long as we continue (as in many classical experiments) to set it tasks that are not its own. Centred on the animal is what might be called a process of ‘giving shape’ to the world; the animal, moreover, has a particular pattern of behaviour. Sigmund Freud has shown that the animal mythology of primitive peoples is reborn in young children of every generation, that the child pictures itself, its parents and the conflicts it has with them in the animals it encounters. Thus in the dreams of Little Hans, the horse comes to embody as unchallengeable a malefic power as the animals sacred to primitive peoples.
