You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
From Anna O, through the famous case studies, to the succession of “chows” that Freud owned, animals in general and dogs in particular have played an interesting but mostly ignored role in the history of psychoanalysis. As we know from anecdotal and biographical sources, Freud came to feel that dogs lacked the sort of ambivalence which made relations among people so frustrating. For this reason, it is probably no accident that his chows appeared on the psychoanalytic scene—in the waiting room, behind the couch, in his correspondence, and so on—even as his pessimism about human nature grew. Indeed, Freud's turn toward dogs was simultaneously a turn away from those he considered “unworthy” of psychoanalysis.
As pack-leader of his unruly horde of parricidal brothers, many have argued that Freud demanded the sort of obedience from his followers better suited for his dogs. For not only did Freud—“The old dog,” as he once put it (Brabant, et al., 1993, p. 150)—“muzzle” his Viennese colleagues (Brabant, et al., 1993, p. 205) who needed to be kept “like dogs on a leash” (Brabant, et al., 1993, p. 227); he is also reported to have complained that some of his followers would “take a bone from the table, and chew it independently in a corner. But it is my bone!” (quoted in Roazen, 1990, p. 163). Without stretching it too much further, it is perhaps not surprising that Carl Jung would finally remark that Freud produced “either slavish sons or impudent puppies” (McGuire, 1974, p. 534).
Whatever one makes of this, it is certainly true that the presence of dogs within Freud's office after 1928 (among his other precious things) only complicated the transference. To be sure, the appearance of Anna Freud's Alsatian named Wolf (ca. ) and Freud's Lun Yug, Jumbo, Jofi, or Lün would have unnerved some analysands. Roy Grinker (1940), for example, waited at the front