Gli animali di Sigmund Freud

3 ABSTRACT This is a thesis about animality, this is a thesis about Sigmund Freud. Animality doesn’t seem one of the most important psychoanalytic themes, nevertheless the title of this thesis is: Sigmund Freud’s animals. Did Freud have a zoological vision? This is own question. In the first chapter, I am going to present animals in the Freud private life and during his pre-psychoanalytic years. The young Sigmund, during his medical study, made several researches about zoology e animal physiology, first with Carl Claus and then whit Ernst von Brücke. In the laboratory he worked with eels, crayfishes and some species of fishes. In 1925, Freud gave to Anna, his daughter, Wolf, an Alsatian black dog. Wolf was the first dog in the Berggasse house. It was followed by a succession of chows, Freud’s favourite race. The first was a Dorothy Burlingham’s gift, her name was Lin Yug or Lun Yu. Then arrived Jo-fi and at the end Lün. The psychoanalyst loved and respected his dog for all his life. Then the real animals in the Freud’s life, in the second chapter, I am going to present the long and heterogeneous series of symbolic and representative animals of the Freud’s works. We have dogs, wolfs, mice, horses, birds, insects and so one. In the chapter there are also the presentations of the most famous cases history as the wolf man, the rat man and the little Hans. From all of this treatments it will constitute the theoretical nucleus that is presented in the third and last chapter. Freud established a collection of fable about animals out of the menageries of his analysands as well as his own textual, extratextual and extraanalytic experiences; but did he have a zoological vision? I going to try to understand the Freud’s thought and answer at this particular question.