The Cat and the Instinctual Feminine: Paws for Thought

Credit: Photo by Blake Cheek for Unsplash

A client of mine—I’ll call her Sarah— dreamt that she was rescuing her cat from a pack of dogs. When she examined the cat, she saw that its right eye had been injured and was weeping pus.

Sarah awoke feeling anxious, then relieved when she realised it had only been a dream. Her first associations were: cat, pus, pussy.

I enjoy the puns and wordplay that dreams sometimes offer us. They can seem almost too obvious, even faintly ridiculous, but the unconscious is not above using a pun to get our attention.

The Cat According to von Franz

Marie-Louise von Franz gave a series of lectures on the symbolism of the cat, later published as The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption. She was not interested in assigning one fixed meaning to the cat. Her concern was with what the animal might represent when the feminine has become enchanted, wounded or unable to appear in fully human form.

For von Franz, the cat belongs to the realm of instinct, embodiment, sensuality and the feminine. This does not mean “feminine” in a narrow or conventional sense. The cat represents something independent and self-possessed: a creature that may live alongside us and love us, but can never be entirely owned.

Unlike the dog, the cat does not live to obey. It knows its own mind. It withdraws when approached too forcefully, appears when it chooses and retains something wild, even when curled up beside the fire.

Tenderness and Claws

Nor is the cat merely soft, pretty or vulnerable. It embodies opposites, which is one of the things I love about it. A cat can be tender and ruthless, playful and predatory, languorous one moment and intensely alert the next.

It also has claws.

This feels important. The instinctual feminine is not only nurturing and accommodating. It can say no. It protects itself. It may know something long before the rational mind has caught up.

The Enchanted Princess

In the fairy tale explored by von Franz, a princess has been transformed into a cat. She is not naturally a cat; she is under a spell. Something that might have developed into conscious feeling, authority, relationship or creativity has become trapped at the instinctual level.

The question, then, is not simply: what does the cat mean?

It is: what human possibility has become imprisoned within the cat?

One Cat Against the Pack

A useful way of approaching a dream is to begin with the idea that every person, animal and object in it represents some aspect of the dreamer. So, when we look at Sarah’s dream, the cat is not only her beloved pet. She also represents a part of Sarah herself.

The cat seems to embody something instinctive, feminine and deeply vulnerable. She is attacked by a pack of dogs: one solitary cat against a collective force.

The dogs may represent something louder, more aggressive or more socially sanctioned. The cat does not belong to the pack. She remains singular.

Perhaps Sarah is rescuing a part of herself that has retained its own instincts but feels threatened by collective demands: duty, noise, aggression or the needs of others. She recognises that the cat belongs to her and that she needs protection.

Yet perhaps this instinctual part of Sarah has remained in the form of a wounded creature that must continually be rescued, rather than becoming a conscious authority in her own right: a woman with language, boundaries, clear sight, and teeth and claws of her own.

The Injured Eye

The injured eye is particularly striking. The cat’s ability to see and orient herself has been damaged. The pus suggests that this is not simply a fresh wound, but an infected area attempting to drain.

Sarah’s spontaneous association—“pus, pussy, cat”—also matters. The image may link the wounded animal to the female body, sexuality and the vulnerability of the instinctual feminine.

But the dream may not end with rescue. The deeper question may be how the wounded cat—this wounded part of Sarah—can be healed, so that instinct, body, sight, independence and authority are able to coexist within her.

About Lynn Somerfield

Lynn Somerfield is a psychotherapist, supervisor, trainer and author with more than thirty years’ experience. She is a trustee of the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education in London, where she worked for many years as a lecturer, supervisor and group facilitator.

In The Secret Language of Symbols, she writes about dreams, symbols, psychotherapy and the curious ways in which the inner and outer worlds sometimes seem to speak to one another.

Her book, The Seeds of Change: How Therapists Cultivate Personal Growth, is published by Routledge.

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Any client material included here is shared with the client’s permission, and identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality.