Animals appear not just as biological creatures, but as vehicles of meaning for human
imagination, mind and culture. Animal life may form the basis for an animalizing imagination
that can enhance our cultural, religious and aesthetic sensibilities. This imagination is rooted
in the pre-modern affective relationship between shamans and their familiars, but can be
tracked to our post-modern ecological crisis, where we can reclaim a totemic identification
with animals as signifiers of a new ecological understanding.

Ecocritics might be attuned to pleas for animal rights and the preservation of habitats. But
what about those animals that inhabit our minds, our language, our discourses? In The
Animalizing Imagination, Alan Bleakley makes the unique claim that our psychological and
textual animals are endangered species. With an approach that combines Jungian
psychology, cultural studies, and ecocriticism, Bleakley argues that we need to embrace an"
animalizing imagination," a sense of animal rites that would honor and protect not only …