Do Animals Have an Inner Child?

Do Animals Have an Inner Child?

Nowadays it is commonly accepted that humans have an inner child. The idea is natural enough: the personality and experiences of the young child stick in the mind in later years, shaping later life. They don’t just disappear at an appointed age, discarded like clothes that no longer fit. The brain bears their imprint going forward. Memories of early life will linger, even if they don’t go back to infancy. We can suppose that play and feelings of dependency will persist; the mother will feature prominently. It is also not unreasonable to believe that the adolescent also leaves remnants of himself as she transforms into adulthood—the inner teenager. Perhaps the inner middle-aged man survives into old age. We have many inner selves not just the most recent one. But is it the same with animals? Once the question is asked the answer seems obvious: of course they do. They too go through stages of maturation characterized by personality changes, accumulating memories, rising intelligence, sexual maturation, and so on. The child lives on: the kitten inside the cat, the pup inside the dog. The adult animal has to live with this secondary self. If it is traumatized, the adult will also be. A huge powerful animal will harbor an infantile inner child. Dinosaurs had their inner children. The baby dinosaur lives on. The adult will remember childhood—the food, the parents, the fear of predators.

In many cases its memory of childhood will be better than human memory; it was born with a more advanced brain and has a shorter childhood. The fledgling will remember its mother and possibly its father. It will remember the lessons taught, feeding at the teats of the mother, sibling rivalries, childhood anxieties. A lion will remember when it didn’t have to hunt for food, and possibly miss those happy lazy days. Its inner child may be more present to it than ours is. For all we know, the whole process may be pretty traumatizing—the hunting, being hunted, aloneness, hunger, fighting. They may well be in need of a good therapist. We don’t know. They don’t say. They may suffer from maternal deprivation, fear of abandonment, agoraphobia. They may have a tormented emotional life. If neglected by their parents, they may suffer from the emotional results. Do they resent the mother for turning them out into the wild before they felt ready? It’s a rough old world out there in animal land—survival of the fittest and all that. Oh, for those halcyon days inside the mother’s pouch (assuming you are a marsupial)! Imagine if you could remember life inside the womb or egg—abruptly followed by the dangerous outside world. We humans are spared these haunting thoughts, but try to imagine what it would be like to have clear memories of life inside the womb; it might feel like a lost paradise (if rather cramped). If there is any truth in Freud’s theories, they would surely carry over mutatis mutandis to our primate relatives and beyond; but no one ever talks about this. I believe that human developmental psychology generalizes to animal developmental psychology, with minor variations. Animals have an inner child too.[1]

[1] The inner child in cats and dogs may be the reason they take to us humans—it takes them back to their childhood. Also, their inner child may make animals more fearful of us than they need to be. I think it is good to remember that animals too are stuck in the psychological past to some degree, a mixture of mature and immature.