One-man dog

Sigmund Freud is pictured here in his Vienna consulting room with his beloved chow, Jo Fi. She joined the Freud household in 1929, soon after the death of Lun Yug, his first chow, whom he had been given as a present two years before. Freud and the dog were inseparable for the seven years of her life, and he allowed the dog to remain during his therapy sessions, as he found her presence a calming influence on patients. ‘One can love an animal like my Jo Fi so deeply’, he wrote; ‘affection without ambivalence.. a feeling of close relationship, of undeniably belonging together.’ Chows are famously ‘one-man dogs’ and their calm, single minded, loyalty touched Freud: ‘They love their friends and bite their enemies, unlike people who are incapable of pure love; they always have to mix love and hate in their object relations.”