Nature & Animals Quote by Edward Bond

Bond flips a familiar insult on its head. We like to talk about the unconscious as the “animal” basement of the mind: brute appetite, dirty impulse, the stuff civilization has to sit on like a lid. His line insists the opposite possibility: what we repress isn’t always bestial, it can be the most recognizably human material we have. Not violence, but vulnerability; not lust, but grief; not selfishness, but the need to be seen. The provocation is moral as much as psychological.

As a playwright, Bond is writing with an ear for what audiences deny in daylight and reveal in the dark. His theatre repeatedly stages how “reasonable” social orders manufacture cruelty while individuals, cornered, discover a capacity for tenderness or ethical clarity that they can’t publicly articulate. In that frame, the unconscious becomes less a junk drawer of urges than a refuge for outlawed humanity: empathy that doesn’t fit the script, doubt that interrupts ideology, tenderness that class discipline or political terror has trained us to treat as weakness.

The line also carries a political subtext. If the unconscious can be “more human,” then dehumanization isn’t our default nature; it’s often a learned performance, rewarded by institutions and group belonging. Bond’s intent isn’t to romanticize the hidden mind but to relocate responsibility: the monstrous isn’t safely tucked away in our animal core. It can be cultivated in the conscious world, while conscience, imagination, and care survive underground, waiting for a situation - or a scene - that forces them into speech.