What Your Baby-Talk to Your Pet Says About You
The evidence was scattered across the living room: a rubber chicken, three nicknames nobody sanctioned, and a voice you swear you never use in public. This detective has heard it through the wall. Everyone who lives with an animal develops a private dialect, and yours says more about you than your browser history ever could.
Seven questions follow. Answer them straight and nobody gets embarrassed — or answer them honestly, which is funnier. When the file closes, you'll know exactly what kind of pet parent the neighborhood has been dealing with, plus a caption to confess with.
See every possible result for this quiz and what each one means →
An audience that never corrects the record
The dog does not dispute your account of why it sat by the door. The cat has never once said that is not what I was thinking. Whatever else an animal in the house provides, it offers an unusually clean surface for a very old psychological process, and the private voice people invent for their pets is that process caught in the act.
What Jung actually meant by projection
Projection, in Jung's usage, is not something you decide to do. Material that belongs to you but has not yet been recognised as yours appears to be sitting in somebody else, so you meet your own contents out in the world wearing a face that is not yours. He put it starkly in Aion, published in 1951: projections turn the surroundings into a replica of one's own unknown face, and the more of them there are, the harder it becomes to see anything else.
He also offered a useful test for spotting one. You do not notice a projection while it fits. You notice it when it stops fitting, when the other party does something the story cannot absorb and the whole construction wobbles. Animals oblige on a regular basis. You have built an entire inner life for the creature, and then it eats a battery.
What the dialect is really a record of
Narrating your pet's inner monologue is a writing exercise with one participant. The vocabulary belongs to you, the grievances belong to you, and the worries you have the cat announce in a silly voice are yours as well. Jung considered all this ordinary rather than a defect. The same process supplies the raw material of falling in love and of instant dislike, and the task is not to stop doing it but to notice when you have.
None of that makes this page an assessment. Seven questions and five outcomes, drawn generously enough that nearly every reader will nod at whichever one arrives, is entertainment with a good instinct behind it. The genuinely informative part is not the result. It is the material you supplied on the way: the voice you invented, the character you handed to an animal that cannot object, and what that character keeps saying.
