The Indian and the Horse

We never seem to manage to consider animals, including and perhaps most of all those we hold captive in scientific laboratories (Hess 2008), as simple and real living beings. We look at them, but we cannot truly see them for what they are (animality is invisible, by definition; Homo sapiens is human precisely because it cannot see the animal).

In front of us, for example, there is a dog: consider the case of Princess Marie Bonaparte – Freud's psychoanalyst friend – and her famous Topsy, an exemplar of the Chow-Chow breed. Her beloved Topsy is actually nothing but a substitute, replacing her son and daughter who have left the family house. But Topsy is also a ‘talisman’, since it bars ‘the entrance of [her] room to a worse ill, and even to death’ (Bonaparte 1994: 79). Topsy, that is, is a symbol – it is other than itself, beyond itself. A living being that cannot just be the life it is, is nothing but a substitute bound to disappoint – such as when Topsy, after a period of sickness, prefers to run with Bonaparte’s youngest daughter, or even with the maid. Freud's reply, however, is surprising, because he does not merely restate the allegorical character of the animal, but takes it a step further: ‘Actually’, he writes, ‘the reasons why one might love an animal with such a singular intensity … are sympathy without ambivalence, the simplification of life, the beauty of a self-completed existence’ (Freud, unpublished; my translation). So far, however, the human's point of view is still privileged, and the dog plays a secondary and exemplary role. But there is more, Freud adds, for there is a ‘feeling of intimate kinship, of indubitable affinity’. Now, the dog is not merely a sign, it is once again a living being of flesh and blood, with its own intrinsic worth, and with whom it is possible to establish a somewhat egalitarian relationship: ‘often, while petting Jofi [Freud's dog] I caught myself humming a melody that I, an absolutely non-musical man, had to recognize as the aria of friendship from Don Juan’ (Freud, unpublished).