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Carole Wilbourn, Who Put Cats on the Couch, Dies at 84
When cats bite or scratch, they’re trying to tell you something. Ms. Wilbourn, a cat therapist, was a pioneer in the art of listening to them.
Carole Wilbourn, a pioneer in feline psychotherapy, having a session with a troubled cat named Finn in 2014. She said she had treated some 13,000 cats. Credit...Bryan Smith/Zuma, via Alamy
By Penelope Green
Jan. 8, 2025
Carole Wilbourn, a self-described cat therapist, who was known for her skill in decoding the emotional life of cats, as confounding as that would seem to be, died on Dec. 23 at her home in Manhattan. She was 84.
Her death was confirmed by her sister Gail Mutrux.
Ms. Wilbourn’s patients shredded sofas, toilet paper and romantic partners. They soiled rugs and beds. They galloped over their sleeping humans in the wee hours. They hissed at babies, dogs and other cats. They chewed electrical wires. They sulked in closets and went on hunger strikes.
They suffered from childhood trauma, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, jealousy and just plain rage. And Ms. Wilbourn, who was self-taught — in college she had studied (human) psychology and majored in education — seemed particularly attuned to the inner workings of their furry minds. A minor Manhattan celebrity, she was often called the kitty Freud, or the mother of cat psychiatry.
Cats hate change, she often noted. Even a new slipcover on the sofa can undo them. Cats are selfish. Unlike dogs, who strive to please their masters, a cat strives to please itself. To mangle a cliché, happy cat, happy (human) life.
“A cat behaves badly when it’s trying to communicate,” Ms. Wilbourn told The Los Angeles Daily News in 1990. “It’s sending an SOS. It’s saying, ‘Please help me.’”
Ms. Wilbourn developed her specialty over a half-century after founding The Cat Practice, billed as Manhattan’s first cats-only hospital, in 1973 with Paul Rowan, a veterinarian. She said she was the first feline therapist in the country, a claim that is not known to have been disputed.
She was the author of six books, including “Cats on the Couch” (first published in 1982), which offered case studies to help cat lovers better understand their furry friends. She treated patients as far away as Australia and Turkey (by phone), and made house calls as far away as Maui.
“Cats have emotions,” she said. “They get happy and sad and frustrated, and, since I understand emotions in people, I understand them in cats.”
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Ms. Wilbourn and Dr. Rowan examining a patient in 1974. Their clinic, The Cat Practice, was said to be one of the first cat-only hospitals in the country.Credit...Bill Aller/The New York Times
Ms. Wilbourn estimated that she had treated 13,000 cats and claimed a success rate of 75 to 80 percent. Take Snoopy, who didn’t like to be held and played rough when he was, and who ran around in circles if he was over-excited. Sobriety, a 3-year-old tabby, scratched her own skin raw. Minina bit all visitors and had to be locked away during dinner parties. Ms. Wilbourn’s diagnosis? Single cat syndrome. The treatment? Another cat, preferably a kitten; lots of attention, but not to the kitten; and, in Sobriety’s case, Valium.
Ms. Wilbourn once treated a cat with Reiki energy-healing therapy after it had accidentally been run through the dryer.
Her go-to prescriptions also included New Age and classical music, recordings of whale songs and an abundance of treats, like catnip (a natural antidepressant, she pointed out). She also suggested canny behavior modifications by the humans in a cat’s life, like having a new romantic partner feed it.
She often recommended, in the days of landlines and answering machines, that humans call their pets and leave them cheerful messages. Her services did not come cheap: House-visits in Manhattan hovered at $400.
“If I lived anywhere besides a big city like New York,” she told The New York Times in 2004, “I’d be on food stamps.”
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Ms. Wilbourn was the author of six books, including “The Inner Cat: A New Approach to Cat Behavior.”Credit...Stein & Day Pub
Carole Cecile Engel was born on March 19, 1940, in the Flushing section of Queens, one of four children of Harriet (Greenwald) and Gustave Engel, a taxi driver. There were no cats in their Queens apartment, but the family did have a canary named Petey.
Carole graduated from Bayside High School and attended the State University of New York at Albany (now the University at Albany), before transferring to New York University, where she studied psychology and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business education in 1964.
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Ms. Wilbourn in 2016 with Orion 2, who survives her.Credit...Thomas Northcut
Her first cat was a part-Siamese named Oliver, whom she adopted through an ad in The Village Voice. She was working as a substitute teacher and a Playboy bunny before opening The Cat Practice with Dr. Rowan, whom she later married.
“She was very attuned to the animals, to their emotional states,” Dr. Rowan said in an interview. “It was very unusual for the time.” As a result, their business flourished.
An earlier marriage, to David Wilbourn, a photographer, ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Dr. Rowan. In addition to Ms. Mutrux, her sister, she is survived by Orion 2, a Siamese.
Ms. Wilbourn was a dog lover, too, and on occasion treated canines, though she never had a dog herself. But she had definite views about anti-cat people. In her experience, she said, some of those who claimed they were allergic to cats often just didn’t like them.
“A cat is a free spirit and will not be subservient,” she wrote in “The Inner Cat” (1978). “People who derive their gratification from giving commands that others must obey can be threatened by a cat. It’s hard to assert your sense of power over a cat.”
