My Kitty Is Sitting Next To Me And Purring, Is He Smiling? Or Is It Just Me?

"Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations." - Sigmund Freud

When Charles Darwin first proposed in the late 1800's that homo sapiens had evolved from and were in fact a species of animal, many humans were horrified. Humans had an unusual need to feel superior, something their fellow animal associates had never quite understood. When Sigmund Freud, a few years later, destroyed the accepted opposition between sanity and madness by locating "normality" on a sliding scale, the poor humans were even more shocked. Taking a step beyond Darwin, Freud believed that the human was an animal in conflict, and informing the human of that very simple concept seemed to only increase the conflict.

The human beasts live in a world of primal darkness, their heads forever stuck in the ground like frightened ostriches living in a constant murky dream state.

So the world is filled with tubular entities. Food goes in one end and shit comes out the other. Sperm goes in and babies come out. It's all we've got. That and love.

And Life Goes On, Without Me.

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Comprehension Of Death

COMPREHENSION OF DEATH (BEREAVEMENT)

Cat appear to comprehend a state of someone not being alive - body temperature changes, smell changes etc. Whether they make the link between a corpse and someone previously alive is not certain, but many cats stop looking for an absent companion after being shown the body of a deceased companion. Therefore cats probably have some comprehension that something dead cannot become alive again.

The display of grief in cats is due to the absence of someone familiar. In humans it is, in part, due to the realization that we will never see that person alive again i.e. to our understanding of the permanence of death.

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