Sigmund Freud and the Art of Dog Training, Part II

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Sigmund Freud & the Art of Dog Training, II

"Happiness is a warm puppy." - Charles Shultz

"What we call happiness comes from the satisfaction of needs
which have been dammed up to a high degree." - Sigmund Freud

In my last article 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.

I think that's fitting, because Freud likened the human mind to a horse (Id) and rider (Ego), but he could just as easily - and perhaps more aptly - have compared the mind 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 our pup to the bank and he does his business right there on the floor? Our self-image is often inextricably bound up in our pups' behaviors. (We also 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 in both cases, 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. As a result the less energy the dog or person has at their disposal for new cognitive tasks. However, once glucose 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 only reinforces the idea that this ability may involve a shared consciousness between dog and owner.)

The authors of this study say that it offers "the first evidence that exerting self-control depletes energy in nonhuman animals." (Holly C. Miller, Kristina F. Pattison, C. Nathan DeWall, Rebecca Rayburn-Reeves and Thomas R. Zentall, Psychological Science, March 2010, March 11, 2010.)

The idea originally comes from a 1998 study 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, which obeys 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 go back through some of my articles, 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 such problems is by giving the dog an alternative outlet for that pressure, specifically through rough-and-tumble outdoor play, which 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 more appropriate social behaviors. And that during the domestication process, dogs expanded on this ability to sublimate their urge to bite in order to secure their 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 psychoanalysis. 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. (Who has never heard the phrase - usually spoken to a baby or young puppy - "You're so cute I could just bite you?")

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 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. Emma 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 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 the 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 Emma was licking the doorknob so as to dominate it or her owners. My first question was this:

"What was Emma 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 doorknobs now."

The simple lesson is that when a puppy is going through an important 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.

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 powerful instinctual urge in this case was the puppy's drive to connect to her owners' hands, shoes, and pajama bottoms 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 a similar motor discharge (licking) onto 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, as well as where she saw them come back, re-establishing the feeling of connectedness that she yearned for.

In some cases, like with Emma, 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 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 would 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 polemic 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 dog trainers and dog owners alike, there may come a time when neither positive reinforcement nor dominance is working with a certain dog. And if that happens, I hope some will remember what I've said here, and think to themselves:

"Maybe it's time to take another look at the man with the cigar."

LCK

"Changing the World, One Dog at a Time"

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