We live our lives how we want it to but is our subconscious constantly working to different stimuli and preventing us doing specific actions?
Ludovico Technique
Today I'm going to talk to you about 'A Clockwork Orange' by Anthony Burgess which contained something pretty interesting to my mind in it. The book is fictional but it explores something called the Ludovico technique.
It is a dystopian novel revolving around aversion therapy which is a psychological treatment that requires the person to be in a state of discomfort coupled with being exposed to a stimulus such as an energy change.
This technique is supposed to cause the person to associate the stimulus with dreary, morbid sensations to impede a particular behaviour.
In the book, a speculum is used to hold open the patient's eyes as he is forced to view violent images for extended periods of time while experiencing paralysis, fear inducing drugs as well as nausea.
The aim of the therapy was to condition the patient to experience severe nausea when experiencing or even thinking about violence, thus creating an aversion to violent behaviour.
The main outcome of this therapy was to condition the patient to undergo intense nausea which thinking about the sinister event like let's say murder to create a zealous hatred to murder conditioning him to not be able to kill another man as he associates it with immense pain and ridicule.
The treatment renders the protagonist of the novel, Alex, incapable of violence even in self-defense, and unable to touch a naked woman or think about having sexual intercourse.
Is Conditioning Happening Now?
If you think about it conditioning is in effect right now, in various forms. You're always being conditioned & conditioning yourself. The thoughts you think, to the TV you watch are both manifestations of habitual consistency. You are an entity that places jurisdiction on one's self to fit in what society expects to be right.
In other words, sometimes we are conditioned due to habits which are repeated stimulus that moulds your mental framework into a perpetual process, how these stimuli are manipulated is all up to you. However, most of conditioning/habits operate under our subconscious as we never realise but in the back of our mind two specific actions are vividly linked.
Habits create a conditioned person. We are being conditioned whether you like it or not. Conditioning is not a relatively bad thing, but it's like a double edged-sword in my opinion. It can be useful if you condition some good traits like open-mindedness or beliefs like "do unto others as you would like to be done to yourself".
In regards to what Alex experienced in the novel A Clockwork Orange, I think it's very well possible. You can train yourself to become familiar with anything, including pain. You can increase your pain threshold by exposing yourself to the same stimulus every day, so in the same way, I think you could manipulate someone's familiarity with violence into a nasty reaction such as vomiting and the person may seize to do that one thing ever again but like in the novel this may require some torturous techniques to inflict these devastating psychological effects.
Despite this talk about conditioning, I found this interesting quote by Stephen Covey:
Thank You for Reading!