It was with a startled delight I saw my old chow Maggie looking out at me from an archival photograph of Sigmund Freud. He is seated at the desk in his study in Vienna. The year is 1937. And the dog is of course not Maggie, but Yofi, one of a generation of Freud’s much-loved chows.
Like Maggie, Yofi has a upward-arching feathery tail, and the thick fur that obscures the slender, sturdy body beneath, plumping out the back flanks in dense ruffles. I used to think of this ruffled fur as Maggie’s rhumba skirts. Although she was part Lab and had a longer nose than the classic chow, the resemblance to Freud’s Yofi is remarkable, including the alert and benevolent gaze.
From Frank Tallis’s Mortal Secrets, a brilliant, multi-layered history of Freud and his times, I have learned more about chows’ formative role in the life of the founder of psychoanalysis. Another enlightening resource was the website Chow Tales, which features several remarkable photographs of Freud with his beloved dogs.
Freud apparently did not become a dog lover until he was in his seventies when his daughter Anna acquired a wolfhound. In 1928. a friend of Anna’s gave him his first chow, which he named Lün-Yu. This the Cantonese title of what we know in English as Confucius’s Analects, and it means discourse or conversation. As well as the connection with chows’ ancestral origins in China, Freud perhaps chose the name because of the talking through of dreams and memories that is the essence of the psychoanalytic process. Sadly, he lost Lün-Yu just 15 months later when the dog wandered away and was later found dead. He grieved for seven months, stricken at this loss of a cherished member of the family.
His next chow was Yofi, a sister of Lün-Yu. With Freud the longest of all his chows, she was to become a sensitive participant in his consultations. He soon realized that Yofi’s presence at his therapeutic sessions reduced any residual tension in the room. Patients would speak more openly when Yofi was there, particularly children and teenagers. She sat in an attentive silence and seemed to be an astute judge of a patient’s feelings. With analysands who were in a depressed state, she would sit close so that they could pet her if they wished.
When Yofi died in 1937, Freud once again suffered an intense sustained grief. His next chow he also named Lün-Yu, and it was she who travelled with the family to England to escape certain death under the anti-Semitic Nazi regime.
In his Mortal Secrets, Frank Tallis gives a gripping account of just how narrow that escape was. The Nazis regarded psychoanalysis as a degrading Jewish science, and in 1933 had burned Freud’s books, along with those of Einstein. When a gang of Nazi supporters invaded and ransacked the Freuds’ apartment in March 1938, they took all the cash in the family’s safe.
Freud’s friend and former student, the British psychologist Ernest Jones, travelled from London to try to persuade his mentor to leave. In this effort, he was aided by the psychoanalyst Princess Marie Bonaparte, who served as a guard, sitting on the stairs outside the Freuds’ apartment. But she could not repel the Gestapo, who arrived a week later to search the premises. They took Anna Freud to Gestapo headquarters where she was in very real danger of being deported and executed. Fortunately, she managed to convince the Gestapo that the Freuds were not political subversives and that the aims of the Psychoanalytic Society were purely scientific. She was let go, and on her return, Freud did that rare thing in his life. He wept openly.
In London Ernest Jones worked tirelessly to expedite British permissions for the Freud family to emigrate. Princess Marie Bonaparte helped financially and by smoothing bureaucratic obstacles. To avoid Nazi confiscation of Freud’s treasured collection of antiquities ˗ the Greek and Roman figures that inspired his ruminations and insights ˗ payments were made to the appropriate authorities. His famous consulting couch was stored for later shipment to London.
The entire Freud household, including Lün-Yu, travelled by Orient Express to Paris and then onward to London. Friends in London helped them to find a comfortable home in Hampstead with a garden. Lün-Yu, however, was confined to quarantine for six months, in accordance with British regulations. Freud, extremely frail from the cancer that was to take his life the following year, visited his beloved dog at the quarantine pound as often as he was able. They were reunited before his death.
Among the most striking of the images on the Chow Tales site is one of Lün-Yu stretching up on her back legs to gaze at her master’s face. She is braced against his knees and the look he bestows on her is absolutely tender, free at that instant from the terrible burden of Civilization and all its discontents.