The Nomadic Alternative – Page 272

Identity. He fails to remember he is human. He often fails to remember which sex he belongs to; and he certainly fails to establish his position with the target of his bearings.

To take one example: a man suffered from a persecution mania, convinced his troubles began in his army days when he had been "treated like a dog". Gradually his obsession with dogs increased and he retreated into insanity believing "I am a dog", running about on all fours, barking at strangers, and rewarding with a sharp snap visitors who invaded his territory to tell him, "You are not a dog."

The animal metaphor had turned to concrete. His symbolic interchange with dogs had once affirmed his identity as a human being who had been unfairly treated "like a dog". Now he had become the dog. And this is not simply a delusion. Patients confined in lunatic asylums do revert to patterns of behaviour which we expect from animals. They form hierarchical structures, 'aggressively' carve out and defend territories for themselves.

It is surely noteworthy that the animal metaphor as a literary genre achieves its most concrete expression in times of international lunacy. How else can we interpret the steady stream of publications informing the literate public that man is just another animal - usually a wolf-like ape? The seemingly interminable Ape-Man or Man-Ape controversy belongs to the same stratum of thought as the Wolf-men or Men-wolves who haunted the imagination of every European peasant child. A Malay who runs 'amok' and kills a man, excuses his crime, "It was not I who killed the man. It was a tiger." And those who, in the institutionalized madness of our times, hope to explain human slaughter in terms of basic animal drives offer the same excuse - without any excuse for so doing.

"And Nebuchadnezzar was driven from men and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagle's feathers and his nails like bird's claws." The mental condition of the King of Babylon, whose heart was changed from that of a man to that of a beast, is exactly the same as the man's who thought he was a dog. But Nebuchadnezzar managed to