In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Of Dogs and Doggerel1
  • Michael Molnar
Abstract

Every year the Freud family dogs presented birthday poems to their master. These rhymes written by Anna were a coded communication with her father and an expression of suppressed tenderness. They enact a return to the affections and appetites of her childhood, and also her anxieties about feeding and separation. The three-way relationship between Anna and Sigmund Freud and their pets confuses behavioural categories. Both the pets and Anna’s doggerel poems (here in their first rhyming translation) mediate outlawed or otherwise ignored impulses. This essay argues the importance of “trivia” in history and biography.

Dreaming, “’we are not in the least surprised when a dog quotes a line of poetry . . .’,” 2 Sigmund Freud (1900) himself quotes in The Interpretation of Dreams. On waking up, though, we may well ask what such dream dogs could have represented? and what verse did they quote? Perhaps we might expect something like the following lines:

Sin manos no se puede agarrarsey sin pecho no abrazarsey sin ojos no mirarsey no amarse sin verdad!

[Without hands you cannot grasp and without a breast you cannot clasp and without eyes you cannot see and without truth you cannot love!] 3

(Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein. August 20, 1873 )

In these lines we hear the seventeen-year-old Freud, in the role of the Spanish dog Cipion, celebrating love and the body and [End Page 269] their necessary conjunction: this early rhyme, in effect, already contains the essence of his future work. Moreover it enacts the end of rhyming, for the series “agarrarse—abrazarse—mirarse” is not allowed to culminate in the fourth and final “amarse.” Instead the ultimate “verdad” [truth] breaks the doggerel pattern by endstopping rhyme and rhythm.

The etymology of the word “doggerel” remains uncertain, although it is likely to have been formed by analogy with dog and in the derogatory sense of something clumsy or ill-done. For in this semantic field a dog is ridiculous or contemptible. However, there is another level of dog imagery where the animal represents fidelity and affection, even a model of ideal love. Two years before her death Anna Freud wrote about her father’s relationship with dogs:

What Freud valued in his dogs was their gracefulness, devotion, and fidelity; what he frequently stressed and praised as a decided advantage over men was the absence of any ambivalence. “Dogs,” as he used to say, “love their friends and bite their enemies, in contrast to men who are incapable of pure love and must at all times mix love and hate in their object relations.” 4

It is apt that Anna should express her father’s view of dogs, for she was often the mediator in his relationship with the animals. During the same period as she wrote the above account, she also recorded her commentary to a compilation of silent amateur films made of her father in the 1930s. [This is the film now shown at the Freud Museums in London and Vienna.] Many of the shots present her father fondling and caressing the dogs, and it is again Anna’s voice that articulates the affection visible in the images. In one of the final scenes, Freud’s last birthday in 1939, she comments on the ceremony of the dogs “greeting” their master. It was Paula the housemaid, she says, who insisted on them doing this. She does not mention that those greetings included, by a family tradition that preceded Paula, doggerel rhymes of her own composition. A number of these vers d’occasion have survived in the archives. In presenting them here, in analogously rhymed English [End Page 270] translation, my purpose is to explore some of the undertones and implications of this dogged tradition.

Dogs may, it is true, serve as our models of affection, but we also know them as cynics, mockers of human idealism. Doggerel too, when used by the cultured and well-read, is generally parodic or burlesque. It should also be noted that in German culture it covers a wider range of registers than English, from Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz to passages in Goethe’s Faust...

Share