A French Veterinary Psychiatrist Puts Cats on the Couch

Even Dog People must admit that cats are having a moment. In a year where Senator JD Vance’s comment about “childless cat ladies” touched off a political firestorm, and a New York magazine article called “Is My Cat a Prisoner?” positioned our pets as windows on our souls (or lack thereof), a book by a jovial Parisian veterinary psychiatrist has steadily climbed the French best-seller lists. Just translated and published in the United States, Claude Béata’s “The Interpretation of Cats” puts cats on the couch — as well as their human companions.

“What do we do with cats?” Béata asked recently over aperitifs in a café not far from the Eiffel Tower. “Today, they are iconic. But yesterday they were devils — witches’ familiars. And tomorrow maybe they will be devils again.Because we don’t understand them. We just project.”

He added, “Cats are not so easily understandable as dogs. Dogs are a social species; it’s easy to talk with them. Cats are strangers.”

In “The Interpretation of Cats,” Béata, 65, explains feline behavior by introducing us to the hyperactive Nougatine, who wreaks chaos wherever he goes; the hypervigilant Caramel; the fiercely territorial Kiss and Cheri; and others, many with appetizing names. But the book was not written just so people can understand why their cats act as they do. It’s also a fount of practical tips for cat owners. He recommends, for instance, that people give cats a drinking place, an eating place and a sleeping place they can claim as their own: “They are individuals and we have to respect them.”

Some of Béata’s advice is culturally specific. The French don’t have a concept of “cat people” as the natural adversaries of “dog people” (vive la différence), and Béata often suggests that his human clients get one of each. Also, the French tend to be more sex-positive when it comes to their pets. For Béata, to deny an animal the ability to reproduce is, in some sense, curtailing their liberties.