Of Dogs, Love and Vindication

It is not sophisticated to discuss your dog. At the office or a party, you may talk of stocks, crime, kids, El Nino, film noir--almost anything other than the amazing, emotional bond between you and a canine friend.

When was the last time you heard anyone ask: “How is Clyde since he swallowed the sealed plastic bag with the leftover steak inside?”

It doesn’t happen. Because to non-dog people, your animal is a home accessory, at best.

So how to explain the millions of people who believe their dogs feel complex emotions; who believe their animals talk, smile, read their owners’ minds, experience joy, love, shame, generosity, sorrow, despair?

How to explain the eccentric lengths to which dog-lovers go to please their canine pets, certain that the animals have the emotional depth to appreciate their efforts?

No scientist has explored the emotional life of dogs since Charles Darwin took a shot at it 125 years ago.

When Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson wanted to read about dog emotions, he phoned animal cognition expert Donald Griffin at Harvard, asking the retired professor to recommend some books.

“If you want to read about it, you’ll have to write it first,” Griffin said.

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And Masson did.

“Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs” (Crown Publishers) is filled with touching observations, speculations, quotes, anecdotes and what little scientific authentication exists to explain why humans and dogs form such intimate bonds.

“No species has ever indicated that it regularly prefers the company of humans to its own species, with the single exception of the dog,” Masson writes.

And he celebrates what he calls “the master emotion of dogs,” their unique ability to love--unconditionally and without ambivalence.

“The capacity to love in a dog is so pronounced, so developed, that it is almost like another sense or another organ,” he writes.

Masson also urges readers to respect the “otherness” of dogs. The dog’s sense of smell is perhaps 100 million times better than ours. Their hearing is more acute. They exist in a universe we humans can never grasp, he says.

Masson’s investigation of the animal/human interchange often translates into stories of tail-wagging, face-licking, incredibly joyous leaps and bounds, tales of dog sensitivity, forgiveness, fidelity and grief.

There’s Greyfriar’s Bobby, the shaggy pooch who watched his master’s burial in an Edinburgh graveyard, and then slept on the grave every night for the next 14 years.

And Hachiko, an Akita in Japan who waited at the train station every night for 12 years after her master (who had died while at work) failed to come home.

The book quickly hit the New York Times best-seller list. (It has not surfaced as a best-seller in L.A.)

And Masson is touring to publicize the work, which cannot be easy for him. It would be understandable if he never opened his door--or his mouth--to a journalist ever again.

The catastrophe that ruined his previous, more illustrious career as a scholar sprang from just such a mistake.

“If I had my life to live over, and only one thing could be changed, [it would be] that interview with Janet Malcolm,” Masson says.

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Before Masson, 56, wrote his current book or coauthored his previous one (“When Elephants Weep”; Delacort Press), he had written 10 others that weren’t best-sellers but had much more intellectual cache.

He is an expert in Sanskrit and Indian culture, a former university professor and a former practicing psychoanalyst.

With BA and PhD degrees from Harvard and a Fulbright scholarship, Masson began his career teaching Sanskrit at the University of Toronto, where he also studied and received a degree in psychoanalysis. At UC Berkeley, he again taught Sanskrit and started seeing patients.

“I wasn’t a good psychoanalyst; I’m much better with dogs,” he says now, only half in jest. Then in what seemed a career-capping coup, he was named director of the Freud archives in London in 1981, with the promise of a permanent appointment the following year.

At Freud’s mansion, the elderly Anna Freud gave Masson access to the huge cupboard that housed all the unpublished letters of her father.

Masson had it made.

He could live at the mansion, direct the archives and the Freud museum, publish learned treatises and enjoy the rarefied European analytic life for the rest of his days.

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Then he discovered troubling letters from Freud to a close friend.

They indicated that The Master knew early in his career that many of his patients (mostly upper-middle-class Austrian women) had been sexually abused in childhood by male relatives or close family friends.

Masson was amazed. He deduced that Freud chose to ignore that early knowledge of real sexual abuse, and proceeded instead to promote his famous theory that these memories were based on sexual fantasy.

Masson still believes he was right.

“It was much better for Freud’s professional career to side with the powerful men in his society than to discover that some of those very men, some who were his trusted colleagues, had perpetrated abuse,” he says.

If Freud had had “the courage of his convictions,” and stayed with his earlier theory, Masson says, psychoanalysis would have taken a different path.

“It would have shifted from a fantasy-based trauma theory to one based in reality,” he says.

“That would have changed everything. It would have been much better for the world.

“I can’t tell you the numbers of women who’ve told me they went to analysts for years. They would say, ‘This and this happened to me,’ and the analyst would say to them, ‘No, no, it didn’t happen. That’s just a fantasy.’

“That was my analytic training, too; it’s what I was taught in the 1970s.”

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If Masson had kept his mouth shut about his discovery, the course of his life would have also been different. But at a lecture he gave to colleagues at the Western New England Pyschoanalytic Society in New Haven, Conn., he discussed the new documents and his interpretation of them.

Word spread fast. Masson was a heretic. A nut.

“All the traditional psychoanalysts were enraged. I was fired from the archives immediately,” he says.

He further enraged them, he says, by telling a New York Times reporter that if his theory was right, psychoanalysis would be like the infamous Ford Pinto: “Every patient ever analyzed would have to be recalled.”

After that, Masson became an outcast in the analytic world.

But, he says, he didn’t care. Believing that the very basis of psychoanalysis was corrupt, he could not tolerate the field, or the people in it, any more.

He decided to return to academia to teach Sanskrit or cultural history at a university.

But Masson’s self-destructive coup de grace was yet to come, in the person of Janet Malcolm.

An esteemed writer for New Yorker magazine, she is known for long, gloom-filled investigations of the world’s quirkier intellects, such as Holocaust philosopher Hannah Arendt and the suicidal poet Sylvia Plath.

Malcolm was eager to write about the man who tried to dethrone Sigmund Freud.

Masson was willing to be immortalized by a fine writer in such a prestigious publication.

“How was I to know?” he asks, waving hands helplessly in the air.

After a week of openhearted conversations with Masson at his Berkeley home, three days spent with him in her own New York City home and six months of lengthy telephone interviews, Malcolm’s two-part, 48,500-word interview appeared in the New Yorker in 1983.

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It was devastating. It was hot stuff. It was read by almost everyone in the intellectual worlds where Masson had previously circulated.

Among the academic elite of the nation, his name briefly became a household word, “a synonym for buffoon,” he says.

He had discussed with Malcolm his intimate thoughts on all aspects analytical and otherwise, including telling her that he’d slept with up to a thousand women.

She had supplemented his verbal indiscretions with interviews of people in the analytic community who detested him, not just for what he had attempted to do, but also for his buoyant, verbose self-confidence.

Masson was so infamous after the articles appeared that when he began dating a well-known feminist, New York magazine wrote an entire article on their unlikely relationship.

He became a pariah in the academic world, he says. He couldn’t get a job anywhere.

“I didn’t think anyone would take Malcolm’s article seriously; they’d probably realize it was partly invention, since it had no footnotes, no sources,” he says. “But they did believe it. She had essentially finished my career. I was really, totally, absolutely finished.”

He had hoped to teach at a university, he says, but after applying to “every place I could think of, including Santa Rosa Junior College, I realized I wouldn’t get a job anywhere. Nobody took me seriously any more.”

Masson filed suit, claiming Malcolm had invented quotes.

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The legal action dragged out for 14 years, concluding last March. Masson won the first round, with a jury determining that, indeed, there were some misquotes. But when the jury couldn’t settle on the amount of Masson’s award, the judge ordered a new trial. Masson lost. As he is a public figure, there was the need to prove that the writer had intentionally defamed him. The jury concluded that Malcolm had not.

The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And in the end, Masson owed Malcolm $100,000 for her legal fees, and a similar amount to his own lawyers.

He had little money, since he hadn’t been working, although he had been producing books.

“Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing” was one of them.

“Final Analysis: Making and Unmaking of an Analyst” was another. They were understandably not big moneymakers, and Masson was looking for what to do next.

By sheer chance, he landed a book contract writing about the emotions of wild animals, with co-author Susan McCarthy. That book’s success made publishers eager for him to write more.

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Masson has just checked into his Beverly Hills hotel room, but his vitality already fills the small space. A competitor’s new book about dogs, half-read, is on the bedside table. Sunny snapshots of his new wife, Leila, (a pediatrician, age 31, whom he wed last month on the sand at Half Moon Bay), their year-old son Ilan, and their dogs, Sasha, Sima and Rani are strewn across the desk.

“I take my three dogs for walks five times a day,” says Masson, who lives in a 100-year-old house in Berkeley, a city that permits dogs to roam off-leash, as long as they are under their owner’s voice control.

He has loved dogs since his youth in Los Angeles, where he frolicked with his spaniel Taffy in the hills near the observatory in Griffith Park.

But he never studied dogs in any formal way until he decided to write his latest book. The irony is not lost on him, he says.

Rejected as an expert in the areas where he has done outstanding work, he has become accepted as an expert in an area where he has no scholarly expertise.

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Dr. Marc Bekoff, biology professor at the University of Colorado and one of the world’s leading experts in the canidae family (wolves, foxes, jackals, coyotes, dogs), says Masson shouldn’t be so down on himself.

“His dog emotion book is very valuable. It makes people think about things they wouldn’t ordinarily think about,” Bekoff says. “I have studied animals for 27 years. And his book even made me aware of some references I didn’t know about.”

Bekoff, too, believes that animals have emotions. “They love, are happy, get jealous and sad. Too many scientists ignore animal emotions, because its more convenient to do horrible things to animals if you deny” that they have emotions.

“My colleagues are going to cringe when they read this, but I’m with Masson on this point. I do think dogs love. I think they forgive. I think they have this incredible generosity, and are right out there with their emotions.”

Masson may eventually be vindicated in other areas as well.

The cover story in this week’s issue of New York magazine implies that psychoanalysis may have “reached its final 50-minute hour” as “more and more New Yorkers shed their analysts’ couches. . . . Even Woody Allen doesn’t take it seriously anymore.”