Using the psychological approach, with a dialogic bonus, allows insight to the cogwork of Thomas Gray’s poem about a dead cat. Composed during this month, in the year 1747, as a memorial at the request of the "Favourite Cat’s" owner, it becomes an illustration of the ID, ego and superego at work.

Any female human being could easily replace the feline as psycoanalysis uncovers sexual desire and oral fixation.

Id houses human desire and aggression, while possessing no sense of organization, logic, self-preservation, or morality. Total consent to id impulses leads to self-destruction, as well as destruction of society. This compartment of the human psyche is inaccessible, or part of the unconscious. (HCAL 127-8) Selima’s actions are symbolic of the id taking control of the conscious actions. The cat sees the fish and desires the fish. Steps are taken to get the fish, gratify desire, ignoring the danger posed by the china bowl of water to the self.

The bowl of goldfish represents sexual desire. Sexual desire is the desire to apply stimuli to one of the three erogenous zones, as developed in early childhood. These zones are, in order of discovery, oral, anal, and genital. Freud theorizes that these phases of erotic development occur during infancy and early childhood. Erotic pleasure may be attained through stimulation as well as through gratifying vital needs, such as eating. (HCAL 133) Selima desires stimulation of the oral erogenous zone by eating the fish. Thus, the goldfish are symbolic, in the broad meaning, of sexual desire and oral fixation.

This piece is a parody, a mock epic. Thomas Gray’s words resonate with a tongue-in-cheek humor, apparent in his descriptive word choice. Formal, serious, lavish language is used in the description of a cat, "demure", "pensive", "snowy", "velvet", "tortoise", "jet", "emerald". This cat is regal, arrogant. The description of the goldfish is also a joke; "angel forms", "Genii", "scaly armour", "nymph". A goldfish is really none of these things, they aren’t geniuses or genies, nor do they have heavy scales that function as armor. Words were chosen carefully to depict a goldfish through the eyes of a hungry cat.

Gray gives away his gender by relating the cat’s behavior to stereotypical female human properties. "With many an ardent wish, She stretch’d, in vain, to reach the prize, What female heart can gold despise? What Cat’s averse to fish?" (21-24) These lines show that he’s familiar with the woman’s desire for jewels, and the cat’s desire for fish, but it does not show an understanding or of , or relation to this desire. He merely reports it to the reader, and shows how this desire is disdainful. In his last stanza, he addresses the moral to "ye beauties", or females. His word choice is that of a male setting down rules. "Not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes And heedless hearts is lawful prize" is in effect, "you want everything you see, but you can’t have it". He makes another reference to jewelry in his choice of "Nor all that glisters, gold." This is the authoritative male voice dictating to women in general, "see what happens when you’re left to your own decision making?" The cat’s death, while ironic, is based on the actual death of Walpole’s cat. By showing the reader that the cat’s death is her own fault, Gray displays his feeling of superiority over the female aspect of the poem. The cat was a female, but Gray uses the cat as a symbol for all female human beings.

This paper is ironic in itself because it utilizes both the psychoanalytic method and the dialogic method. Bakhtin, to whom dialogics belong, saw the psychological approach "as a diminishment of the human soul and an attendant sacrifice of human freedom." (HCAL 349) Both methods of analytic criticism are relevant, however, to Robert Gray’s "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat".