Gurevich P.S. Do Animals Have Unconscious?

Abstract: The question whether animals have the unconscious does not seem to admit a negative answer. But understanding of this problem necessitates, on the one hand, consideration of the processes of domestication of animals, their taming, and on the other hand, analysis of the processes that go on now in the life of living beings in general. The article reinterprets the traditional demarcations between animals and people. While in the beginning of the past century psychiatrists and philosophers believed that psychoses, serious neurotic disorders are not characteristic for animals but are a human “privilege”, in the beginning of this century we obtained extensive material indicative of deep and versatile neurotization of animals.The article uses methods of psychological and psychiatric analysis of the processes going on nowadays in the realm of domestic animals. As has been shown, the canons of zoopsychology are now replaced by zoopsychiatry. Therefore, the methods and techniques of interpreting traditional problems of the mind and the unconscious change, too.The novelty of the article is in the fact that there is a possibility of combining experimental data of zoopsychology and the findings of psychological studies of human society. Traditionally, the life of animals and humans has been viewed separately. For instance, nobody could think of transferring the laws of human existence into animal communities. Neither was practiced the projection of knowledge about animal communities onto human behaviour. Meanwhile, J. Baudrillard has shown that such superposition of the two systems is not only specific but also extremely significant. Observing neurotization of domestic animals, we can see that similar processes take place also in human communities. Thus opens up a new field of research into mental phenomena.

Keywords: