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I’ve always known who Sigmund Freud was, but never studied him or read any thorough information about the man.  Today I spend hours reading about him from a Psychology book and also from spark notes about the man.  I was delighted to learn a few things.Freud almost always had a dog as an adult, and he like Martha Stewart for a long time, chose Chows Chows.  I have an affinity for Chow’s because I used to own two of them, one of whom for 12 years.  I still miss her.

Freud had a long distance relationship for many years prior to marrying his wife.

Freud started the “couch” in therapy thing because he didn’t like people looking at him for hours upon hours.  He found that if he asked people to lie down, they would study the ceiling rather than him.  This also reduced any unwanted influence that Freud’s expressions might make on the therapy session.

Two quotes that I really fell in love with are “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”
From Sigmund Freud: Life and Work by Ernest Jones and “Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
From New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1932.

I also learned that dogs being used for human therapy may have started with Freud. 

“Dogs do many things to help people. One of their most unusual functions involves assisting in psychotherapy.  This all started with Sigmund Freud, who had a series of dogs, most of them chow-chows. Freud felt that dogs had a special sense that allows them to judge a person’s character accurately. For this reason his favorite chow-chow, Jo-Fi, attended all of his therapy sessions; Freud admitted that he often depended upon Jo-Fi for an assessment of the patient’s mental state. He also felt that the presence of the dog seemed to have a calming influence on all patients, particularly children. More recent studies have shown that Freud was correct. Physiological measures show that petting a calm and friendly dog actually reduces stress (as shown by reduced muscle tension, more regular breathing and a slower heart rate).There is even some evidence that people who own dogs are likely to live longer and require less medical attention. Freud’s dog Jo-Fi would alert him to any stress or tension in a patient by where he lay down during the session. He lay relatively close to calm patients, but would stay across the room if the patient was tense. Jo-Fi also helped the great psychoanalyst determine when a therapy session was finished by unfailingly getting up and moving toward the office door when the hour was up. Freud, however, denied the rumor that Jo-Fi actually did the therapeutic psychoanalysis and wrote up the case reports”.