Monday, October 19, 2009

Ultra-Violence & Rape = nausea. Classical Conditioning in A Clockwork Orange

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In A Clockwork Orange, a film by Stanley Kubrick, Alex's main interests are ultra-violence, rape, and Beethoven. The doctors in this futuristic film want to change that. To do this, they must condition Alex to associate these things (well, primarily just the ultra-violence and rape) with something distasteful. The Ludovico Treatment is just the thing for this endeavor:

"The idea is that if the patient is forced to watch the horribly graphic rapes, assaults and other acts of violence while suffering from the drug effects, the patient will assimilate the sensations and then become incapacitated or very ill either attempting to perform or even just witnessing said acts of violence" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludovico_technique)

Essentially, this is textbook classical conditioning. Through the Ludovico Treatment, Alex "learned" to associate the horrible feelings of nausea with the violent images so that when he experienced violence in real life, the same feelings of nausea would overcome him and force him to retreat from said violence.

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