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Created: February 18, 2003
Latest Update: February 18, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Illocutionary Understanding of a TeenAge Kitten

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, February 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This weekend Arnold and I found a cat book in the Bay Books Bookstore just across the street from the Double Tree Hotel and the Death Penalty Defense Seminar. Seemed an appropriate break from mitigation and forgivenss discussions. But soon, to my amazement, I discovered that my teenage cat appeared to fit descriptions of serious symptoms of mental distress, spoken of in this book as "separation anxiety," even though we had left him and his sister cat with Pat. The author gave us a brief introduction to both Jungian and Freudian therapy modalities, and suggested myriad ways that with intense effort we could help the little cat back to mental health and security. One of these therapy modalities was to spend considerably more "quality" time with the young teenager.

King Tut and Cleopatra took care of that themselves as soon as we got home. They both charged out into the street, over to Racer's house, and came back only when I begged at the front gate. Then Tut made us play "catch me fair and square, or I won't come in." At 11 p.m., after driving all the way from Monterey (with a swollen hand and cracked head.) More quality time, indeed!

And that brings me to the moral of this story. Americans, particularly Western Americans, tend to be hardy John Wayne types. If they done ya wrong, whip out your six-shooter and take care of the problem. You don't have to kill 'em, just let 'em know who the boss is. That means that we are far more likely to say "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime." That means that we are often insensitive to those who get caught up in misunderstandings, in situatiions in which they are overwhelmed, scared, find themselves outside prescribed norms.

As it turns out, we have King Tut because Cleopatra was so depressed when we returned from South Africa that we were seriously worried about losing her. She's 16. That's pretty old for a cat. And yes, she was depressed. It started when our dog, Donatello, died. She evinced no interest in pretty much anything, slept all day, didn't want to go outside, didn't pay us much attention. Arnold was convinced that the cat was convinced we had "done away" with Doni, and were going to do the same to her. Go figure! And they say cats don't think! Well, Arnold certainly does.

Cleopatra had had the cat lady come in to feed her and keep her company while we were in Africa. But the rest of the time she was alone, and she had grown up with lots of animals who had died of old age over the years. I'm not sure whether our solution was Jungian or Freudian, but we decided she needed another cat who would live with her and keep her company while we were in China. So home came Tut, at six weeks, as soon as we could rescue him from bottle feeding, and lived in pampered style for the four weeks before we left for China.

Cleopatra, in defiance of all expectations, refused to have very much to do with the little guy, other than an occasional hiss and a quick right hook when he got fresh. But she tolerated him, and we figured she'd be glad of the company, especially when we contracted with the cat lady to come more frequently than once a day. To our relieved amazement, they were both (the cats; the cat lady was fine, too) reasonably hardy and happy when we returned. Clearly Cleopatra was not depressed, but, wow, had she developed that right hook. Anna, who cleans for us, would just look at Tut, and say "Bad Boy." And Pat told us that the Cat Lady thought Cleopatra was wonderful, but that Tut was a "Holy Terror." Obviously, we had yet to discover the appropriate formula to separation anxiety, but we all appeared to at least be surviving.

I'm sure that attending the death penalty seminar influenced my reaction to the cat book. (Remember interdependence.) We really had worried a lot about how the cats would get along, even though we knew they had Pat and visits from Racer, and should have been fine. Turns out Arnold brought me the book because he had discovered the section on "separation anxiety." All I could do when I found the Jungian and Freudian modality interpretations was giggle. Now I'm gonna try Jungian therapy on a teen age cat??? But I did settle down and read the whole book. It's OK. We bought it, so I can share with any of you who have cats suffering separation anxiety or any other distressing mental health reaction. Giggling at cat therapy is socially acceptable in a society that kills off zillions of animals a year because people fail to provide homes for them, or want to eat them, or because they're in the way environmentally. This is not a society yet willing to take the emotional confusion and pain of its animals seriously. Hey, I'd even give a lot for schools that would take our kids' emotional confusion and pain seriously.

Neither is this a society willing to seriously consider the pain of those we call "criminals," the flimsy protection we sometimes provide in searching for evidence of guilt, or the appropriateness of the punishment we inherited from the dark ages. We hardly get around to even noticing that they have families who are affected by the punishment quite as much, if not more, than they are. See Ladies in Waiting for stories of such families.

The same way Anna labeled my teenage hunk of cat energy "Bad Boy," real boys are so labeled. Tut just has the additional luck to have someone that reads dumb books about separation anxiety for cats, and concludes that they aren't dumb at all, but just the kind of reading we should be giving our juries about our so-called "criminals."

I have no idea what Tut did to provoke the "bad boy" reactions we heard about. But I'm reasonably sure that when he was being labeled no one was carefully watching their own interaction with his specific behavior to tell what they were doing that was interdependently merging with his behavior. We're humans. He's a cat. But that's what cat therapists, and, I guess, dog therapists do, you know. They listen to the animal, and watch it's behavior, in the presence of those (animal or human) it's ineracting with, to try to communicate to creature and human what they're trying to tell each other. Once you know that, you have some understanding of the interaction, and then, as long as the cat is not trying to have you for dinner, or the dog, for that matter, you can probably work out a quasi-comfortable relationship.

With me, Tut's real clear. I love stuffed animals. I love to hug and kiss. Teenage cats do not. They don't mind a little kissy-face now and then, but they pretty much like their freedom, which he also tells me by playing "I won't come in till you catch me fair and square." Net result, I shouldn't give up my day job and my stuffed animals. All I have to do to send that animal running is make a nice smacking sound and say "I love you." He's outta there.

Now speaking of all this communicating, labeling, and trying to forge comfortable relationships, doesn't this sound a bit like illocutionary discussions? NO! I do not mean you should tell your parents or unsuspecting friends that you are having illocutionary discussions with the neighbor's cat. But if that cat does piss you off, maybe you ought to try an illocutionary listening session. What I'd really like you to see is the extent to which so much of all our behavior stems from communication, and how hard we make that communication by our "knowingness" sometimes. You gotta listen - - - in good faith.

To follow this story in criminology over the next few weeks link to Mitigation and Forgiveness, uploaded February 18, 2003.