On and Off the Couch: The Dogs of Psychoanalysis

The psychoanalytic bestiary is full of dogs. The clinical and theoretical literature abounds in examples of canine symbolism, phobia, projection, anthropomorphism, surrogacy, and identification. Many psychoanalysts, from Anna and Sigmund Freud to contemporary practitioners, have been devoted dog companions, and dogs have been present in countless psychoanalytic sessions—increasingly, as acknowledged coparticipants. Dogs themselves have been studied, and even treated, psychodynamically. Yet there has never been a comprehensive examination of the relation between dogs and psychoanalysis. And while no single species could fully address “the question of the animal” in psychoanalysis, there is no species more thoroughly implicated in psychoanalytic history, theory, and practice than Canis familiaris. Thus my lecture will not only provide an introduction to the prominent place of dogs, both real and imaginary, in the clinical, metapsychological, and sociocultural dimensions of psychoanalysis, but it will also begin to make a case for expanding and reorienting psychoanalytic thought toward the probability that there are nonhuman animals whose experience of the world is structured by something like the unconscious and who relate intersubjectively to their human companions.

Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty affiliate of Penn’s programs in Comparative Literature and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. He is also a founding faculty member and current Co-director of Penn’s Psychoanalytic Studies program, as well as the Founding Editor of the blog Psyche on Campus—winner of the 2022 “Award for Excellence in Journalism” from the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is the author of dozens of scholarly articles on American and African American Literature, Cinema Studies, Poetry and Poetics, and Psychoanalytic Studies. He is also the author of two scholarly monographs, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present (Routledge, 2025); the editor of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (Oxford University Press, 2023) and (with Brian Connolly) of Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (Duke University Press, 2024); and the co-translator (with Noura Wedell and Paul Grant) of Jean Louis Schefer’s The Ordinary Man of Cinema [L’Homme ordinaire du cinema] (MIT Press, 2016). His latest book, Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance, is forthcoming from Punctum Books.

For five months beginning in February 2025, he will serve as the Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis. During this time he will teach the course “Animals in Mind: Psychoanalysis and Narratives of Human-Animal Encounter” at the University of Vienna, and at the Sigmund Freud Museum he will pursue the research and writing of his new book, Fido and Psyche: Dogs in and around Psychoanalysis, 1871 to the Present: An Illustrated History.