Psych 'em, Fido!

When a dog's social relationships are uncertain, or its family environment is insecure, or its master fails to live up to the kind of leadership image the dog has in mind, there is fertile ground for the seeds of mental illness to take root.

That, at least, is the theory of a few "doctors" around the U.S. who bill themselves as "canine psychologists." The leading practitioner, a Beverly Hills man named Dare Miller, 40, has propagated a whole four-dollar Freudian vocabulary to explain what it is that teaches old dogs new tics.

According to Miller, who takes it all quite seriously, a dog can be afflicted with an "anxiety syndrome," a "jealousy syndrome," the "secretary syndrome," "dominance frustration," "barrier frustration," or even "psychosexual misorientation." And that's bad, because dogs burdened with those neuroses tend to destroy bedroom slippers, jump on guests, bite mailmen, wet on carpets, bark early in the morning and stop wagging their tails.

A dog thus troubled can see Miller for six 50-minute sessions for $245 (in advance). Miller has a B.S. in child psychology from California State College, and a "doctorate of psychology" from a now-defunct Kansas City, Mo., institution called the College of Philosophy.

Under Miller's patient probing, any number of dread disorders may be identified. The anxiety syndrome and dominance frustration affect a dog who thinks that its master is too unmanly to protect the home; the animal feels that it must boss the household, and so attacks anybody who comes around. The secretary syndrome arises when the master works late at the office; the dog becomes tense and irritable because its master is not at home on time. In barrier frustration, the dog gets infuriated because it cannot break its lesh. Psychosexual misorientation is something esle. If the pup has been weaned in a "traumatic" way, it ewill indicate maladjustment by "narcissitic behavior" (overeating and excessive scratching) and "preoccupation with oral behavior in general" (biting the postman).

Sibling Rivalry. Miller's Canine Behavior Center usually has two dozen dogs under treatment, and Miller has had a number of celebrity cases in his practice. He claims to have cured Kirk Douglas' apricot poodle of "terribly regressive" characteristics, disposed of the "postman syndrome" in the dogs of Lauren Bacall and Anthony Franciosa, and erased the dominance frustration in Katharine Hepburn's German shepherd. He did not have much luck with a case of sibling rivalry in Bob Hope's dogs, but he blames that partly on the Hopes, who did not show up for most of the counseling sessions. But Miller says that he had enormous success with Governor Ronald Reagan's young collie, turning it from a frisky puppy into a mature dog that the Governor is now "able to communicate with."

Miller's chief technical contribution to the art of dog psychology is an item he calls the "Hi-Fido." Retailed for $11.95 along with training manuals, it is a tiny tuning fork, attached to a simple chain, that vibrates at 34,200 cycles per second--just above a dog's threshold of hearing. The sound creates a fleeting moment of distraction for the animal. When a dog owner spots his pet doing something wrong--such as chewing on the sofa--he simply tosses the Hi-Fido on the floor. The tuning fork vibrates, the dog is distracted, and eventually, insists Miller, a Pavlovian association is created that makes the sofa itself a distraction. If the animal then proceeds to gnaw on the Hi-Fido, it is clearly psychodogmatic. A cure for that is to give it a belt on the behind with a rolled-up newspaper.

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