Psychoanalysis: Eating Meat and Loving Animals
- Erich Linder
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Who doesn’t love animals? Many of us say we do. The devilish detail lies in the ways we love them.
Some love animals out of respect, others because they care for them, and some love them by petting them so hard they kill them, like Lennie, in Of Mice and Men. Psychoanalysis teaches us that we all love in these ways, though to varying degrees. Our love is often kneaded with hate, it moves us through the drives of possession and can lead us to idealize and misrepresent those in front of us, whether they are talking animals or not.
Freud remarked, some would say “discovered,” that we just can’t reliably separate the purest aspects of our love from the uncanny forces that move us. These forces are dubbed “unconscious” for a very good reason. They shape our actions and our intentions without us noticing. Many of us who approach the animal question do so running on a road paved with good intentions. Psychoanalysis warns us that we might just be heading towards hell.
Despite this important warning, little has been said – though something already has– about how our relationship with the other animals can be further understood through psychoanalytic thought. As Teddy Duncan Jr. tells us at the beginning of this conversation with Claudia Hirtenfelder on The Animal Turn: psychoanalysis did not take animals too seriously, and in animal studies there has been little interest in our unconscious. It seems there has been resistance on both sides.
Resistance
Resistance, according to psychoanalysis, happens when something unacceptable – a representation of the world, a way we feel about it or about ourselves – tries to make its way towards the surface of consciousness, but its efforts are suffocated. The unconscious aspects of our Ego promptly repress the unacceptable drives and leaves us to our symptomatically stiffened life. Whether it is a traumatic memory from the past, a forbidden crush or profound hatred for someone who we should love, all unacceptable contents of our psyche are hidden under the brittle veil of our consciousness.
The classical image of resistance is that of a factual event that has been relegated into oblivion like Hitchcock’s Dr. Petersen who helps her patient retrieve and piece together fragments of his past life. Another psychoanalytic topos tells us that sometimes our perception fails us, and part of reality gets hidden in service of our frail ego. When it comes to animals, for example, some of those who hoard them, Sue-Ellen Brown notes, do so under the illusion of helping them, or even of loving them, and can no longer perceive their physical decline or the progressive worsening of their living conditions.
But our unconscious also shapes our lives in much more mundane ways: sometimes we are aware of some facts. We know that animals are being killed by the billions every year, but we act as if that was not the case. Sometimes in these cases, it is not a fact that is blocked from reaching the surface or our awareness, it’s the broader implications of that fact. We know that animals get killed for food, we know that we don’t want them to be killed for food, we know we could do something about it, but we don’t really engage with this chain of thought. Some might be tempted to brush it off as cynicism. But that can’t quite be it, especially for those who say they love animals. Duncan jr. diagnoses it as a case of disavowal.
Disavowel
Disavowal is a defence mechanism in which we do not fully integrate in our psychological world the knowledge of the reality we are facing: "You know that the meat is the result of the death of an animal, and you love that animal, right? Or you love animals, and you care for their wellbeing. But there's that part of reality is just kind of lobbed off, it's completely severed. And so, you can continue the action." As Claudia sums it up in the podcast: “there is knowing and there is knowing.”
Duncan Jr. holds that the reason for the disavowal of animal suffering partially lies in our ambivalent relationship to them. We recognize animals as beings we care for, and it is precisely because of that attachment that we cannot easily bear the idea of what we do to them, so we displace that knowledge.
We displace it, but at the same time, we do not fully erase it: it returns in a displaced and managed form. We hide it by calling pieces of chest “brisket” and pieces of shoulder “chuck”; we also encounter it in jokes and not-so-subtle advertising where the killing of the animal is not hidden but hinted at, such as the “Eat More Chicken” Chick-Fil-A-Cows Ad Campaign Duncan Jr. discusses in his book and on the show.
But why do we do that? Is it just because we really want to eat animals and naming them in other ways helps us hide the horror? Maybe. But maybe, there is something more perverse going on. Perhaps jouissance.
Jouissance
In his book Interpreting Meat: Theorizing the Commodification and Consumption of Animals Duncan Jr. develops a Lacanian analysis of the way we talk about animals in the meat production industry. Lacan developed a form of psychoanalysis centred on language. Unlike other psychoanalytic approaches, it has often been used in ideological critique and in accounts of unconscious drives sustained and obscured by language through the analysis of linguistic practices.[1] Such practices reflect the ways in which jouissance gains its force from the contradictions of our daily life.
Jouissance is a Lacanian term introduced to describe “a pleasure that is excessive, leading to a sense of being overwhelmed or disgusted, yet simultaneously providing a source of fascination.” It thrives in contradictions, in breaking the rules. As the rule of not killing what you love. The subtle reminder that what we are eating is a subject and not just a morally inert source of protein is a source of pleasure.
Jouissance is an enjoyment bound to the very circulation of this contradiction: we do not simply enjoy despite the ethical tension, but through the way the tension is staged, softened, and repeatedly reintroduced into everyday consumption. As Duncan Jr. put it in the podcast:
“There's an enjoyment of that, of this kind of perverse enjoyment of what should not be enjoyed. The mascot of the pig brings another kind of enjoyment. Not just the gastronomic enjoyment of ‘I like eating the meat,’ right?”
It is, then, precisely some people’s alleged love for animals that sustains, to some degrees, their pleasure in consuming their bodies. Some do love animals but do so just to add flavour to the meal.
[1] Notice that there are concerns about whether the “knowledge” gained through the practice of psychoanalysis can legitimately be employed in analysis at the societal level. Such a move requires careful justification. I encourage readers to consult Duncan Jr.’s book as well as Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology for a more nuanced discussion.
Erich Linder is an ethicist and philosopher. Erich Linder is undertaking his PhD at the University of Vienna and a guest researcher at the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine. His research focuses on descriptive approaches to moral philosophy. He is particularly interested in applying ideas from the Wittgensteinian and the constitutivist tradition to practical problems in animal ethics. He is also interested in moral psychology and the relation between psychoanalsiys and ethics. The Animal Turn now has a signal channel where you can discuss content with others.
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