Originally published in slightly
different form on April 8, 2010 at PsychologyToday.com.
“Happiness is a warm puppy.” - Charles Shultz“What we call happiness comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.” - Sigmund Freud
In my last article here at
Psychology Today, I made the
claim that understanding some of the basic principles of Freudian psychology
can help us—dog owners and dog trainers alike—understand our dogs better, and
that Freud’s ideas may be more relevant to dog training than those of Konrad
Lorenz, Ivan Pavlov or B. F. Skinner.
I also pointed to some of the latest research in neurobiology, which validates Freud’s views that the psyche is divided into the Id
and the Ego. In simplest terms, and neurologically speaking, these correlate
with the limbic system (Id/unconscious urges and emotions) and the pre-frontal
cortex (Ego / conscious thought/executive-function).
In other articles here
I’ve presented the idea that a dog’s behavior operates more along the lines of
a natural energy system than it does either as part of a dominance hierarchy or
solely as the result of reinforcement schedules. When we examine Freud’s view that
the Ego’s primary role is to suppress most of the unbound energy contained
within the Id, we can start to see that there’s also a direct correlation
between some of the basic precepts of Freudian psychology and with the idea
that all canine behavior operates as part of an energy system.
That’s fitting,
because Freud likened the mind to a horse (Id) and rider (Ego), but he
could just as easily—and perhaps more aptly—have compared it to a puppy
and its owner.
Why?
Because, except when
sleeping, puppies have almost boundless energy and curiosity. They’re always
sticking their noses, not to mention their teeth, into places they don’t
belong. The owner’s goal is to prevent the little guy from doing too much
damage to the owner’s clothes, furniture, skin, or to the pup himself. This is
often a matter of the owner’s Ego (both small e and capital E) constantly
repressing the puppy’s desires. We worry what our friends or relatives will
think of us when they come to visit. What if we take the little cutie to the
bank and he does his business right there on the floor? Our self-image is often
inextricably bound up in our pup’s behaviors. (We also often channel our inner
parent when we interact with our puppies.) So we do everything we can to repress,
and put a lid on—or as Freud puts it “dam up”—the puppy’s desires.
There’s almost no way
around this. In most cases we’re just trying to keep the puppy from danger. And
when we’re not, we’re unable to see the link between the childhood battles we
may have fought with our parents and the battles we’re now having with our pup.
Those battles are locked deep within our unconscious minds; the puppy just does
what all good dogs do, he fetches them for us, brings them to the surface for
us to deal with.
Think of the words we
commonly associate with training: leash, collar, harness, “No!” “Bad!” “Wait!”
“Down!” “Stop!” “Stay!” etc. They’re all designed to put a lid on a dog’s
energy.
Over time, the puppy
learns to repress his instincts and impulses on his own. This is a matter both
of conditioning and an outgrowth of the symbiotic relationship that develops
between the pup’s mind and that of his owners, a form of embodied, embedded cognition.
The two begin to share a single mind, where the puppy is pure Id and the owner
is the Id’s control mechanism.
The thing is, though, that
while puppies may have difficulty learning impulse control—at least initially—as
a species dogs are actually more capable of doing this than any other animal on
earth, except humans and dolphins. In fact, impulse control may be an
evolutionary artifact, a direct outgrowth of the dog’s shared evolutionary history with the wolf.
A recent study on dogs, “Common Self-Control Processes in Humans and Dogs“ shows that dogs exert impulse control in exactly
the same manner as humans. And that this ability to suppress one’s own desires
(alternately called “self-control,” “delayed gratification,” “volition,” and
other things), is measured through the depletion of blood glucose levels in the
pre-frontal cortex, or “executive-function” portion of the brain. The more
impulse control, the more blood glucose is depleted, so the less energy the dog
or person has at their disposal for new cognitive tasks. However, once those
levels are restored, the ability to learn new tasks, and to control one’s
impulses, is restored as well. (The dogs in this study were given commands that
involved impulse control—they weren’t put into positions where they had to do
this on their own—which reinforces the idea that this may involve a shared
consciousness between the dog and owner.)
The authors say that their
study offers “the first evidence that exerting self-control depletes energy in
nonhuman animals.” (Miller, Pattison, DeWall,
Rayburn-Reeves and Zentall, Psychological Science, March
2010, March 11, 2010.)
This idea originally comes
from a 1998 study done on humans (“Ego
Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?” by Roy E
Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne M. Tice (1998), which
was heavily influenced by Freud’s psychology (which in turn was heavily
influenced by the idea that the mind is an energy system, obedient to the laws
of thermodynamics). In it the authors write that the “...theory that volition
is one of the self’s crucial functions can be traced back at least to Freud
(1923/ 1961a, 1933/1961b), who described the ego as the part of the psyche that
must deal with the reality of the external world by mediating between
conflicting inner and outer pressures. ... Freud also seems to have believed
that the ego needed to use some energy in making such a decision. ... [and] he
recognized the conceptual value of postulating that the ego operated on an
energy model.”
If you’ve read some of the
articles I’ve written here, you’ll see that when I talk about behavioral
problems in dogs, I tend to describe them in terms of internal pressures—tension
and stress—and that one of the best ways to solve most behavioral problems is
by giving the dog an alternative outlet for that pressure, specifically through
rough-and-tumble
outdoor play, which releases tension and also increases the
production of brain-derived growth factors.
You’ll also find several articles
where I talk about how when wolves evolved to form packs (for the purpose of
hunting large prey), they learned to sublimate their urge to bite into social
behaviors. And that during the domestication process, dogs expanded on this
ability to sublimate their urge to bite in order to secure a place within the
human household.
I know that in the
strictest sense of the word, sublimation refers to a means of redirecting the
energy behind raw sexual urges into other, more acceptable social behaviors,
such as art and culture. This was one of the primary focal points of Freud’s
psychoanalytic theory. However, Freud also made a distinction between Eros—the
energy inherent to all natural drives and desires —and the libido—the
reflection of that energy as it manifests in the form of personality. So while
we may not think of a dog’s urge to bite as having its origins in sexuality, it
does. That’s because there is—beneath the surface of both sexual and aggressive
urges—an overpowering drive to connect with the object of one’s desire.
So how does this Freudian
dynamic play out in terms of a puppy’s development?
In his book, Before and
After Getting Your Puppy, Dr. Ian
Dunbar writes, “The more dogs bite as puppies, the softer and safer their jaws
in adulthood.” I agree, but would modify that statement as follows: “The more
dogs are able to use their teeth to softly and gently mouth their owners, or to
engage in rough-and-tumble play, the happier and better behaved they’ll be as
adult doggies.”
This brings up a seminal
event in the development of my ideas on dog training.
Years ago, I got a call
from a potential client whose dog had a very unusual problem. Annie (not her
real name) was a small wheaten terrier who liked to lick doorknobs. In fact,
she would obsessively lick the knob on the front door of her owners’ apartment
every time someone came in or went out, and she would continue licking it for
at least twenty minutes or so, no matter what they did to try to stop her.
I knew that licking was
one way a dog has of sublimating its urge to bite. So my first question wasn’t
about how the behavior might’ve been reinforced, or whether someone had at some
point opened the front door with bacon grease on their hands, and the dog had
begun licking the doorknob as a result. Nor did I waste time supposing that
Annie was licking the doorknob so as to dominate it or her owners. No, my first
question was this: “What was Annie like during her oral phase?”
“Oh, she was terrible.
Always mouthing us and biting our clothes.”
“And did you punish her
for it?”
“Yes. We were told that
whenever she mouthed or nipped, even in play, we should grab her by the snout,
give her a smack under the chin, and say, ‘No! Bad dog!’”
“Well, that’s why she
can’t stop licking the doorknob now.”
The simple lesson is that
when a puppy is going through a developmental phase, and you “dam up” the
energy behind those impulses, you’re guaranteeing that the pup will develop
some kind of behavioral problem later in life.
In “Neurosis and Psychosis
(1924),” Freud writes: “The transference neuroses originate from the ego’s
refusing to accept a powerful instinctual impulse existing in its id, and
denying it a motor discharge.” The impulse denied was mouthing, the neurosis was obsessive licking.
The powerful instinctual
urge in this case was the puppy’s drive to connect to her owners through her
teeth, i.e., by mouthing and nipping in play, which are both harmless impulses,
but that are, nevertheless, as Dr. Dunbar points out, important for proper
social and emotional development in dogs. The owner, in the role of the ego,
denied that impulse its “motor discharge,” and as a result the impulse was transferred
to another object—the doorknob—which represented another form of connection to
the owners, as it was the focal point for where the puppy saw her owners—the
objects of her desires—leave her alone each day, making her feel disconnected.
It was also the focal point for where she saw them come back home,
re-establishing the feeling of connectedness that she’d lost and yearned for.
(Note: the doorknob could not have been operated in any other way than by the
hands of the dog’s owners, the same hands that had punished the dog for using
her teeth in what, to her at least, was a positive social gesture.)
In some cases, like with
Annie, the through-line is fairly clear (though it would’ve been clearer if
she’d become a biter rather than a licker). In others, like with my dog
Freddie’s panic attacks, the dog seems totally fine until an emotional stressor
brings his repressed feelings to the surface. (People used to tell me how
“calm” Freddie was; but then, when we moved to a new apartment, things changed,
and shortly after that his panic attacks started.) In both cases, the course of
action was to teach the dog to bite as hard as possible while playing tug or
fetch with its owners outdoors.
Of course the repression
of developmental urges isn’t the only way dogs can develop behavioral problems.
It can happen through trauma and through neglect. However, traumatic
experiences always foster fear, which automatically represses a dog’s drive. As
for neglect, that’s simply the flip-side of repression with the same general
result; a lack of proper development in the dog’s prey drive increases the
amount of energy directed toward the dog’s survival instincts, and,
consequently, away from the sex and social instincts, both of which are related
to the prey drive, and both of which are important to normal behavior in dogs.
I know that Freud has
fallen out of favor in the last forty years or so. And, in some respects,
there’s probably a good reason for that (though Freud was the first to admit
that his theories might be proven or disproven by future scientific inquiry).
And I seriously doubt if you’ll find many other dog trainers, if any, who base
their work, even in the smallest way, on Freud’s philosophy, as I do. It’s also
doubtful if my little polemics here will have enough weight to sway other
trainers to my way of thinking. In my opinion, we all approach dog training
more through the unconscious emotional connections we feel with our dogs than
through our (only slightly more rational) “conscious minds.”
But for both trainers and
owners, there may come a time when neither positive reinforcement nor dominance
works. If that happens, I hope some will remember what I’ve said, and think to
themselves: “Maybe it’s time to take
another look at the man with the cigar.”
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