Anxiety in Animals and Speaking Animals

Abstract

Should anxiety be understood as an affect specific to (or characteristic of) human existence alone, or does animal life share in it as well? When, for instance, a household dog begins to rove about erratically and whimper helplessly in the event of an earthquake or a great thunderstorm, would one be justified in characterizing the dog’s behavior—that is, its catastrophic reaction—as anxious? Even supposing that it were somehow possible to determine with a modest degree of certainty that the animal’s reaction was indeed an anxious one, how would one then go about accounting for it? And what implications, if any, would such an account have on Lacan’s clinical understanding of anxiety?