Your dog probably has a great store of memories within her cerebral cortex, but she is unable to use them like you do because she lacks an ego, a consciousness of herself as an “I."
You began moving away from your dog’s world of symbols and illusions as an infant, when you began deconstructing images through your evolving intellect. Thanks to your ego, you began acquiring language to control the objects in your environment.
Words are social objects that one human learns from other humans in a long, complicated acquisition of language. For a word to become a social symbol, at least two humans must agree on its meaning. Otherwise, each person would simply talk to himself, using the kind of incomprehensible language babbled by some mental patients.
What an Animal Knows But Can’t Share
Your dog’s senses are highly developed, so she probably has an image in mind of a remembered event. In a recent study conducted by Alliston Reid and John Pilley at Wofford College, a female Border Collie named Chaser was able to learn the names of 1,022 objects over a period of three years, acquiring the vocabulary of the average three-year-old human. Unlike a human child, of course, Chaser could only manage to respond and interact with others through barks and cute head, tail, and paw motions.
An ape’s 450-cubic-centimetre brain is large enough to permit imaginary pictures of past events, which may in turn present a picture of potential events. This writer recalls a visit to the Bronx Zoo ape “house” when another visitor, grasping a shiny red apple, entered. The great ape turned to see the man with the apple and glanced nonchalantly away as the man tossed the apple to him. The ape backhanded the apple, glanced away again, and without warning hurled it with surprising accuracy and at great velocity at the man’s head like a pitcher throwing to first to catch the runner off guard.
When the ape saw the man approach with the apple, he may have recalled similar events. This memory helped him anticipate the apple toss and equipped him to “decide” to have some fun by throwing it back.
By reacting to his environment, the ape committed an acute social act. But an animal’s ability to react to such stimuli cannot take symbolic form until its reaction becomes a mutually shared venture. In the ape house, the reaction was shared with me, laughing, and the man with chunks of broken apple in his hair, frowning, but not with the other two apes in the cage. They paid no attention. Not a word was spoken.
The first real evidence of human extrinsic symbolization, Paleolithic cave art, is only 40,000-years-old; but shared activities such as fire building, tool-making, hunting and gathering indicate that humans were linking their reactions to other humans by means of extrinsic symbols from the moment they began walking the earth.
The Human Advantage of Slow Development
The pregnancy of a Rhesus monkey lasts for 166 days, while a human female’s goes on for 266. Mother Rhesus suckles her infant for a few weeks. A human baby requires her mother’s milk for one to two years. During that long time, the human baby is completely dependent upon the mother. Its huge head sits precariously on its tiny body. That great, cute head may appear to be too big, but it’s disguising the serious incubation of a large and complicated brain inside.
Human babies are made so different from animals by the slow development and helpless dependence on adults during a long, drawn-out infancy. With the great size of its brain, the human infant has a peculiar psychological sensitivity that enables her to react to her environment by controlling many different processes at once with complete freedom from direct stimulus. As information is fed into the slow developing control center we call a brain, she learns to build words, complete sentences, and to manipulate math formulas. No other animal has this power.
The “Ego” I and the “Id” Object
The ego exemplifies a large brained animal’s central control of behavior. Freud’s translator chose to use the Greek word “ego” for the German “ich,” or “I.” He also translated the German “es,” or “it,” as the Greek word “id.” In this way, the translator made an easy understanding of Freud unnecessarily difficult.
The ego, or "I," is the thought process, as in “I am hungry, so I will eat now.” The id, or "it," is a picture, a memory, a sensation. Animals like your dog are almost entirely “it," living in a world of timeless sensation, punctuated by a rewarding treat or, better yet, your affectionate praise, but without any central controlling "I".
Animals can only react, lacking the ego that controls reactivity. The human infant spends its slow, patient development building an ego, a sense of "I." With time, information, and attention, the infant’s ego creates time by giving her world of events a fixed point of self-reference.
The Human Voice Reveals How Humans are Unique
Your dog’s conscious life may be something like you experience in dreams and nightmares, which occur in sleep as your ego takes a much needed break, according to Freud’s theory of dreams. To relate herself to past, present, and future and to break down her hallucinatory store of memories, even the well trained Border Collie, Chaser, must fix herself in time with a precise designation of self and that requires the speech that she will never possess.
Dr. Ernest Becker, who believed that individuals' characters are essentially formed around the process of denying their own mortality, that this denial is necessary for us to function in the world and that this character-armor prevents genuine self-knowledge, put it this way in his book, The Birth and Death of Meaning: “Speech is not merely part of human behavior, or merely integral to it, or simply the most important aspect of it. Speech is everything that we call specifically human, because without speech there can be no true ego . . . The ego relates the world to itself so that it can control it. But the control resides in the ‘I,’ a linguistic point of self-reference.”
First Comes “Mine” and “Me,” and Only Then, “I”
Back when you were a child, your slow development -- so unique to humans -- gave you time to learn how to conceive of yourself in relation to your mother, when you were helplessly dependent upon her breast, and then to others you needed who surrounded you in a complex environment.
Once you began controlling that environment to get what you needed by crying and screaming, you began to acquire an ego and then you learned the personal pronoun “I," no matter what language was used in your personal environment. “I” became your “rallying point” for self-consciousness. All the events you encountered in the outside world began to converge on that center of awareness – your “I.” And you began to acquire words.
For most infants, that first word is “momma,” imitating the sound made while sucking and showing the dependence on mother and her breast. “I” is just a word too, and the baby’s primary ego already existed before she learned that word as it slowly developed a self-conscious awareness of her ego through that word.
Bolstered by your name, you began using the words “mine” and “me” and then "I" to take command of your world. Just as 007 introduced himself to strangers with an unmistakable point of reference (“Bond . . . James Bond”), so you make yourself known as a separate individual with your unambiguous name.
Who Are You?
Your “I” took form in relation to all those around you. If your dog had acquired a pronominal “I” in addition to the name you gave her, and if she identified each of the individual humans and animals in her world, her actions would no longer occur in a timeless world of emotions punctuated by sharp sensations (for example: who provides the food and drink, who could take it away).
Freud pointed out that the science of psychoanalysis was basically the study of an individual’s adaptation to his own slow development. Again: The human is a slowly developing animal with a large brain that becomes conscious of himself (his ego) as an object (his id).
Dr. Becker wrote, “He discovers his body as something in the outside world . . . Man is the only animal – in the universe, for all we know – who sees himself as an object.”
When you were a baby, your mother gave you a consciousness of “me.” Your power of “I” grew, slowly and gradually, out of the vital social union with a “not me” object (your mother’s breast) followed by your union with some transitional object (your blanket, doll, or Teddy bear).
This transition to a comforting way station “id” was your first step away from your omnipotent mother and toward your own powerful self. Eventually, you began to employ the vocal symbols learned from your parents in order to manipulate and control objects in your environment. First, of course, you had to learn to live with yourself – your own body -- as an object.
Sources:
- Becker, Ernest, The Birth and Death of Meaning, A Perspective in Psychiatry and Anthropology, The Free Press of Glencoe, A Division of The Macmillan Company, New York, NY, 1962
- Brown, Norman O., Life Against Death, The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York, NY, 1959
- Storr, Anthony, Freud: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, NY, 1989
- Pryor, Karen, Don’t Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training, Ringpress Books Ltd., Gloucestershire, UK, 2002
John Anderson - John Anderson has worked as a journalist, editor, advertising executive, Internet pioneer, and he has authored four books.
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