Born to Bark (15 page)

Wolf and I worked out other small decisions over those days we were together. In the end I felt as though I knew where I was going and what I would be doing. It was as though I had undergone an extensive round of psychotherapy and had achieved the insight, comfort, and guidance that clinical psychologist strive to bring to their patients.

In a way, I had blundered inadvertently into what today is known as
pet-assisted therapy
. In North America the number
of pet-assisted therapy programs was under twenty in 1980, but by the year 2000 more than one thousand such programs were in operation. We probably owe the origin of using dogs as part of psychotherapy to Sigmund Freud (funny how often that name comes up when a psychologist is writing or talking), who often had one of his dogs with him during therapy sessions. He first noticed that the presence of the dog seemed to be beneficial for patients who were children or adolescents. The
y seemed more willing to talk openly when the dog was in the room.

Later, Freud noticed that having the dog in the room also had a positive effect even if the patient was an adult. He thought that this might be due to the fact that patients often worry about whether what they are saying might seem unacceptable to a listener—even a psychologist. However, nothing the patient ever says will shock the therapist’s furry companion, who continues to stay close and pay attention. Freud suggested that this gave the patient a sense of safety and acceptance. Clearly, this was what had been happening between Wolf and me.

Although Freud carefully recorded his observations and interpretations in notes and journals, they were not well known or readily available until the 1960s. The first f
ormal presentation of pet-assisted therapy came about quite independently, more than 20 years after that great psychologist’s death. Boris Levinson, a clinical psychologist associated with Yeshiva University in New York, was working with a very disturbed child and noticed that when he had his dog Jingles with him, therapy sessions with this child were much more productive. Other children who had difficulty communicating also seemed more at ease and actually made real attempts at conversation when the dog was close by. Levinson presented a scientific paper describing his results at a meeting of the Am
erican Psychological Association. Other psychologists were not impressed by his results, and many ridiculed his work—some even asked him what percentage of the therapy fees he paid to the dog.

Freud’s influence reached out from beyond his grave to help rescue Levinson’s work and reputation. Shortly after Levinson’s case studies were reported, Freud’s journals were translated and published. New insights into Freud’s life also came from books published by people who knew him and who mentioned his therapeutic use of his dog. With evidence that a scientific icon such as Freud was willing to entertain the value of animal helpers in psychotherapy, the laughter stopped and some serious research began.

As I sat on a rocking chair talking with Wolf, it was 10 years before any new convincing scientific confirmation of the therapeutic value of interacting with a dog would be published in scientific journals. I just knew that it dang well worked for me, dag nabit!

There is an old saying, “Every journey begins with a single step.” The real truth is that every journey begins with an intention or a plan to go somewhere. Having benefited from what seemed like a miracle, I was starting a new journey and a new life. My 6 or 7 days of meditation and therapy with Wolf had given me my plan. I now knew what I had to do. First, I had to get a house or some sort of living space that would allow me to have a dog. It could be a little house, since I was planning on sharing it with a little dog. Next, get the dog. Along the way I wanted to control my addiction to w
ork and research and reestablish and strengthen some friendships that I had neglected during my illness. It would also be nice to find a life partner to share my new home.

I went to Peter, who was still head of the department, and explained that I wanted to earn a bit more cash, so he signed me up to teach an evening course and two additional courses in the summer. It was a lot of extra teaching, but it was the same subject matter that I had been teaching since I arrived at UBC. Over two years my savings grew to the point that I had enough to finally put an initial payment on my little house.

This heavy teaching load was often exhausting, but I enjoyed working with the interesting range of students that populated the evening and summer classes. In my large evening sections of Introductory Psychology, there are always a few mature students—individuals who are clearly older than the average undergraduate, people who had to delay completing their university education because of financial, family, or work-related concerns.

The stories of these mature students are often quite interesting. I once had a pair of adult students taking my course, one of whom was a convict o
n parole who was trying to get a college degree to start a new life, while the other was his parole officer. The parole officer enrolled in my section of the course initially to monitor whether his client was actively working on his education. He also seemed a little upset by the fact that the convict was earning higher grades than he was.

Another mature student in my class was a thin brunette woman who seemed to be around my age. She appeared to be quite dedicated to getting good grades but also less than perfectly organized. Since my classes are large, with the smallest being around 200 students, my examinations are made up of multiple-choice questions, and the scoring is done by machine. As part of the testing process, students must know their university identification number, because grades are entered and sorted using that code. This number is listed on students’ registration materials and library cards. U
sually for the first test in each course I make sure that I have the class list with me just in case someone forgets his number, but after the first test I assume that everyone knows it. Immediately before the first examination this woman came down to the front of the class because she did not know her student number. Her name was Joan, and I searched
the list and found her number. Just before the second test, however, she appeared before me again, this time quite embarrassed.

“I know that you’ll think that I must be ditzy, but I forgot my student number again,” she said.

I didn’t have the list with me that time, so I told her to bring her materials to me directly at the end of the test period and we would walk to my office to find the list that had her number.

On the way to my office I noticed that Joan had very pretty eyes, a sort of greenish-blue with some light brown flecks, and so transparent that I felt as if I were looking through the water to see the bottom of a clear mountain lake. She also had a sweet sort of half smile when she was relaxed. She was also wearing a wedding ring.

Joan seemed a bit shy around me, almost as if she were a little frightened, and for some reason I got the impression that she had been undergoing some rough times—or she may have just been uncomfortable being the only student in the class who did not have her student number for this second exam. Walking to my office, she explained that she had been trained as a medical laboratory technician and worked for several years in a hospital in Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Now that she had moved to Vancouver she was returning to the university because she wanted to become
a primary school teacher. It didn’t cross my mind then that Wolf had suggested that a good partner for me would be a nurse or grade school teacher, and now I was talking with someone who was a kind of hybrid of those two professions. It would be a couple of years before my relationship with Joan developed beyond professor and student.

My friend Peter Suedfeld is quite brilliant in many ways, and much of his life reads like a plot for a book. He was born in Hungary, and his father was a concert cellist. His life fell apart
with the onset of World War II, when most of his family became victims of the holocaust. As the Nazis clamped down on the Jewish population, their living conditions became more brutal and dangerous. After the Russians liberated Budapest, Peter and his father managed to sneak into Austria and ultimately found their way to New York, where Peter was reared by an impoverished great-aunt. However, he made it through school based on hard work and native intelligence, served in the army as a sniper stationed in the Philippines, and returned to complete his university training as a psychologist.

Peter reads or speaks four languages. He is a creative researcher and good writer. One of the most exciting aspects of his research has to do with his studies of extreme and unusual environments. This research has taken him into the high Arctic and the North Pole and down to the Antarctic and the South Pole. In the process he became the head of the Canadian Antarctic Research Program. He has consulted with NASA and worked with astronauts in both the American and Russian space programs. During all of this he still had time to serve as head of the Psychology Department for twelve yea
rs, dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies for six years, president of the Canadian Psychological Association … well, you get the idea.

One evening we sat in my apartment eating one of our favorite comfort foods, spaghetti with marinara sauce and sausages. After I had poured some red wine, I told him I wanted his advice on dealing with my research addiction. He smiled and said, “You know, as addictions go, being addicted to research and writing is not so bad. If you think about it, no scientist who was historically significant was casual about his research. You have to have a compulsion to spend the time and effort to make progress in science, and it is hard to turn your brain off when you are struggling with
a problem or a manuscript.

“I’ll tell you what I think your real problem is—time management! You do virtually everything in your lab by yourself.
You have one research assistant and a couple of part-time students doing the testing, and everything else you do by yourself. You end up doing a lot of the data coding and routine analysis. You even stuff envelopes when you are sending out sets of research surveys. Do you really think that that kind of work requires a full professor with a PhD degree?”

Peter’s advice was to obtain some additional grant funding and put it all into paying for lab personnel to do the routine work. I did as he suggested, and it freed up a large amount of time for more creative work and writing. My rate of publication went up, and several theoretical breakthroughs emerged from the research. I was still coming into campus early, but I could leave at a normal hour and had time to spend my evenings in more relaxing activities or with friends.

If I were ever to be able to have that dog and that regular family life, I would have to be comfortable with the idea of spending a little more time at home. So I set up something more like an office in my apartment and began to work at home two afternoons each week. To my surprise, working at home actually seemed more efficient, since I had few interruptions and could concentrate fully.