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It really explains why we can love an animal… with such extraordinary intensity; affection without ambivalence, the simplicity of a life free from the almost unbearable conflict of civilization, the beauty of an existence complete in itself…. Often when stroking Jo-fi [Freud's dog] I have caught myself humming a melody which, unmusical as I am, I can't help recognizing as the aria from Don Giovanni: “a bond of friendship unites us both.”
Like Freud, and for that matter, like any devoted dog owner you happen to meet on the street or in the park, I love my dog. “He is my best friend,” I often say to people. Harry, a one-year-old cocker spaniel, was a “rescue” dog, a code word for a pup that was given up by his owner and either left on the street or given to a dog pound. In Harry's case, he was abused and abandoned, a stray found on the Brooklyn side of the Belt Parkway, starving, filthy with fleas and tics, and very frightened. According to the foster lady, Shirley, a remarkable woman from whom I obtained Harry and whose life mission is to rescue cocker spaniels from certain death in the pound or on the street and find them a good home, Harry was a sweet dog, though a traumatized one. When we first met Harry in her Queens, New York, home, he was still very skinny and fearful, with long floppy ears and sad eyes. Nevertheless, within a few minutes it was clear that both my wife and I, child and adult psychoanalysts, respectively, felt a summoning call from Harry, “Help me, love me, take good care of me.”
Pausing for a moment, we wondered out loud to ourselves,