After a recent Leo Bersani seminar on the subject of ‘cruising’ and the new ways it has opened up for relating to others, I was chatting to one of the organisers. He suggested that cats were the ultimate cruisers: they didn’t expect things to last, nor seek to bring all that they were into a relationship, but remained independent and contained. Dogs, on the other hand, were monogamists in love, and people turned to dogs when human relationships were not working so well. I responded by saying that dogs were not merely substitutes, but had unique things to offer: Lacan, famously, was fond of his dog because ‘he takes me for no-one else’.

Unable to resist what psychologists call ‘transference’, we might project our failings onto dogs—but it’s unlikely they do the same in reverse. Transference is there whenever old, often unspoken patterns or templates of viewing others and getting close to others (or not) script even the newest encounters we have with other people. Before you know it you are reminding someone of someone else, while you encounter in them difficulties or impasses in developing relationships that have been with you for decades. The hardest thing about transference is that all this repetition doesn’t mean you are more likely to see these patterns, give them a good shake and reappraise them. They are what Christopher Bollas calls part of ‘the unthought known’. It’s all done with smoke and mirrors. With people, transference is two-way. At least with dogs, there is a built-in freshness and there’s no risk with them of ‘counter-transference’. They don’t put up defences against unpleasant realisations about themselves in the way we do. That inclination in us is part of what makes it so complicated for us to love each other—a complication that doesn’t exist in our loving dogs.