Carl Jung’s view of Animal “Vivisection.”
What fascinated me most of all was the morphological point of view in the broadest sense.
With physiology it was just the opposite.
I found the subject thoroughly repellent because of vivisection, which was practiced merely for purposes of demonstration.
I could never free myself from the feeling that warm-blooded creatures were akin to us and not just cerebral automata.
Consequently I cut demonstration classes whenever I could.
I realized that one had to experiment on animals, but the demonstration of such experiments nevertheless seemed to me horrible, barbarous, and above all unnecessary.
I had imagination enough to picture the demonstrated procedures from a mere description of them.
My compassion for animals did not derive from the Buddhistic trimmings of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but rested on the deeper foundation of a primitive attitude of mind on an unconscious identity with animals.
At the time, of course, I was wholly ignorant of this important psychological fact.
My repugnance for physiology was so great that my examination results in this subject were correspondingly poor.
Nevertheless, I scraped through. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 101.
