This is a true story of how I successfully psychoanalyzed my dog. Yes, you read that correctly. However, it is not so much a story about the strengths of psychoanalysis as it is about the way we think critically about our world and gather 'knowledge,' and how we can implement that knowledge in every day life.
Anti-Vet
I've written at length about the shortcomings of the scientific methods elsewhere. These shortcomings are intensified more than ever in the field of veterinarian science which is just scientific enough to claim authority, but not authoritative enough to autocritique or adapt to its clients, and ultimately lacking in structural incentives to improve in those areas.
The vet mixes true Scotsman fallacies with confirmation biases to masquerade as medical epistemology. You bring your dog in, the vet looks at it for a minute, gives a diagnosis based on incredibly limited information generated from abstract models of knowledge, then prescribes general medicine. If the meds work, the diagnosis was correct, and there is no reason to reflect. If the meds don't work, prescribe more meds, test more, and there is no reason to reflect. There is no true, rigorous way of testing the effect of vet treatments, and the vet has no incentive to get it right the first time because they'd rather rope you back in once a week over the next two months to up the doses, charging you each time.
In this sense, 21st century veterinary mirrors 19th century psychiatry which pulls from - as I have written elsewhere - 16th-18th century medical ('blood letting') and cosmological ('lunar cheese') epistemological models, which then reappear in 19th-21st century critique of sociopolitical models (nonactual vs. 'actual' communism).
Analogies
1:
A: a true Scotsman would never drink milk
B: there is a Scotsman drinking milk
C: they must not 'really' be a Scotsman
2:
A: the moon is made of cheese3:
B: we mined the moon and found only rock
C: the moon is made of cheese, you just didn't dig deep enough
A: blood letting cures diseases, saves lives, etc.4:
B: we let a great deal of blood from the patient, the disease wasn't cured, the patient died.
C: blood letting does work, you just didn't let enough blood.
A: the patient is diagnosed as X, treatment is Y
B: the patient of diagnosis X did not get better
C: the patient must've not kept up with treatment Y, prescribe more Y
5:
A: communism is x, y, and z6:
B: in general, countries that referred to themselves as or based themselves in communism failed
C: well, that's not 'actual' communism
A: veterinary treatment is helpful and grounded in correct assumptions
B: these treatments have not helped our dog improve
C: we just did not give enough helpful and correct treatment
Vignette: Ethology Meets Psychoanalysis
About a year ago my girlfriend and I's wonderful little dog began exhibiting odd behavior in the house. Seemingly unprompted, he would assume a defensive position - tail between the legs, hunched legs, ears down, etc. - and would began scanning the room above his head anxiously with his eyes. His eyes would then appear to lock onto and follow objects that were not there, then he'd jump and attempt to bite the invisible objects. The vet diagnosed our poor boy with a rare neurological seizure disorder that required intense medical treatment or surgery, both of which were as dangerous as they were expensive.
My girlfriend and I decided to think on it before responding, at which point I got the idea to help our dog on our own. Spoiler alert - our dog no longer displays these symptoms, nor any other symptoms of such disorder, and is perfectly healthy. In line with our above critique of veterinary epistemology , the vet's response was simply 'Well, we can't explain how the symptoms have gone away, but we don't need to if they, because that's good!' End of story.
More interestingly, here's how I 'cured' my dog:
Through first drawing inferences from the symptomatic behavior - defensive stance, looking around for and jumping at invisible objects, etc., - and then associating to them - behavior reminded me of the time our dog first encountered flying insects on a hiking trip where he displayed the same behavior - I theorized that our dog was having a behavioral response to a perceived stimuli that was not there. In layman's terms, the dog believed there were bugs and thus its body unconsciously acted the part.
My thinking was that the first experience of bugs on the hiking trip had triggered latent behavioral structures that were inherent in him but, due to the sheltered nature of the dog, previously inhibited or unexpressed (in-born vs. learned behavior). The bringing out of the new behavior structure meant it was fresh, and had not been exposed to various situations where it would cybernetically feedback with the environment and thereby hone the stereotype or schema. As ethologists show, behavioral structures or stereotypes / schemas take in and sort out noise and signal over time, and thus develop more precise models and therefore more precise parameters for triggering a behavior.
As developmental psychologists similarly show, a child learns 'dog,' sees a dog, says dog, gets positive feedback from the parent. Next, a child sees a cat, says 'dog,' and gets negative feedback from the parent - 'no, that is a cat.' The child uses negative and positive reinforcement - or feedback - to modulate parameters, and learns to exclude the aspects pertaining to the 'cat' model from the 'dog' model. The dog model is now honed, and more precise. This process continues on and on until our internal working models are more and more precise and therefore better at mapping the outside.
For my dog, because the information 'gate' was so sensitive, the behavioral response was easily triggered, and because the stimulating object - certain insects - were so scary to my dog, being as they were so new and in a foreign location, the whole experience was 'recorded,' so to speak, as a trauma. In less anthropomorphic terms, it was evolutionarily important to my dog (and therefore perhaps biochemically intensive, i.e. life or death) that the experience of insects be stored along with an associated 'danger' or defense response. This meant a 'perception' of high risk coupled with a very sensitive, low , threshold to trigger the macro-behavior of responding to flying insects. This meant a very loose behavioral schema.
In humans, in psychoanalytic terminology, this is close to anxiety or hysteria, or more generally what we could call neurosis, in the sense that it is an experience of having real, intensified or exaggerated bodily responses to imagined or hallucinated objects or sensations based on unstable internal 'object relations' or internal working models.
The treatment, then, was to help the dog realize that there were no bugs, i.e., to enrichen and expand the stereotypical model or schema to include more information that could be used to hone the triggering of the behavioral response (not necessarily a brute exposure to 'the real' but a cooperative process of helping the dog filter information). Whenever my dog would begin to display these symptomatic behaviors, I would first shame the dog, but then immediately comfort the dog, hold the dog up to the spots in the air he was looking at, then play with the dog. After about a month of repeating this, our dog would began to scan the room, though would not enter into a defensive stance, and then would avert the scanning gaze and instead look for a toy. After a few more weeks, the scanning behavior, along with all other symptomatic behaviors, had disappeared.
Conclusion
It's not that this 'proves' psychoanalysis is grounded in more scientific fields such as ethology, behaviorism, development psych, or epistemology (though it does show where these fields resonate and can functionalize concepts); rather, this shows that the field of veterinary studies, along with mainstream pop-science - what D and G refer to as 'royal science' - as a whole tends towards uncritical, uninformed, and expensive surgical and pharmaceutical interventions that may be unnecessary, and that given there is little monetary or intellectual incentive to challenge this, this poses both an epistemological and ethical conflict for vets.
It may also say something larger about the 'physicalist' trend in the royal sciences, that demarcates a hard split between what is physical and therefore real and what is 'theoretical' or mental and therefore unreal. Where the materialism of psychoanalysis meets up with the cybernetic theory beneath behaviorism and cognitive science is an interesting cross roads that hints at a deep, hyperstitional, sorcery - or minor science...On that note - one wonders, what happened to the good ole days of doing individual, experimental, research? This is the question of D and G's minor sciences that should be explored further.
Post Script
As a last comment, I urge people to listen to their vets. I am not an expert, and in what is probably the majority of cases, listening to your vet will save or at least help your animal. What I have introduced here is merely an incident where it was beneficial to challenge a 'medical' authority, and try an alternative approach; an exploration that is intended to produce thought, not obedience. It would be foolish to insert myself and this blog as an authority over the vet. The point is, like the concept of the behavioral structure / schema we discussed here, to expand our models of thinking to be able to consider all information, and filter out noise and signal.
