Not Even As Good As a Dog?

This was Jia Zonglin’s status update yesterday.

I remember learning from the book Dog Stories that Freud had quite a bit of history with dogs. For instance, when conducting psychotherapy sessions, he always kept a dog by his side, and the dog’s barking would mark the end of a session. Bringing a small dog into sessions also gave a measure of psychological comfort to shy patients who struggled to express themselves. Later, when Freud was old and gravely ill, his body gave off a smell of decay so strong that even the dog he loved refused to come near him. This pained him deeply. Why did Freud love dogs so much? Not just for their usefulness in his sessions, but for their utterly straightforward emotions — love or hate, nothing in between. Humans, by contrast, often can’t manage that at all. He once lamented over this: why can’t human beings love and hate the way dogs do? We’re never able to love or hate completely — love always comes wrapped in a bit of hate, and hate, at times, mixed with a bit of love.

So then — are humans really not even as good as dogs?