Introduction
The true nature of classical conditioning lies in the responding with some action for some stimulus caused by artificial cause. The earliest researches of classical conditioning were conducted by Russian scientists Pavlov, who proved that if we ring the bell every time before we feed the dog, it associate the bell with the process of feeding, so in some period of such a repeated action the dog starts drooling as the same stimulus make him think that he is going to be fed now (Schmajuk, 2008). So in simple words, the classical conditioning is about attaching one stimulus from the surrounding to a certain response with the help of a constant repetition of the stimulus.
Analysis of the Classical Conditioning within the movie
The movie of world renowned director Stanley Kubrick named “A Clockwork Orange” shows us another technique related to the classical conditioning which here is called the aversion therapy. The main purpose of the aversion therapy is to be able to change the behaviour of the person in a positive way. The doctors use such stimulus as constant pain or electricity to show that bad and deviant behaviour will lead to some severe consequences. Such a technique and approach is very effective and useful, especially in such an anti-utopian society, but the area of our concerned is the ethics of aversion therapy as it violate many of the laws and interfere with the main moral values.
The whole process of curing is characterized by the patient having a bad experience and suffering from all kinds of tortures and looking at the scenes of violence. Some of the psychologists tried to implement this technique to the real life by making some of the convicts an offer. According to the offer they had to participate in their experiment of this technique in exchange for decreasing the time of their imprisoning (Goodfriend, 2012). There is no doubt that these techniques are unethical and people cannot use such violent stimuli that make people suffer in any way.
The main hero of the film is called Alex and he has a very deviant behaviour since he is a leader of a small gang that enjoy beating the people to death, stealing things and raping women. But betrayed by his ex-gang members, Alex must go to jail in order to rehabilitate, change his behaviour and become an ordinary member of the society. With the help of his two-face nature, Alex succeeds in convincing the psychiatrist and the rulers of the penitentiary that he sincerely wants to change his behaviour and become a good person. But this makes him no good as they chose him for the experiment of the aversion therapy in order to treat him for his bad behaviour and extreme violence.
So conducting the experiment, Alex is injected with some unusual medicine which is supposed to make him feel sick and bad, but they lie to him that this medicine is just a portion of the vitamins he needs (A Clockwork Orange, 1971). He is also forced to sit still in the chair and watch the scene of violence like killing of people, hurting them, raping of women. The psychiatrists use the scenes as a stimulus and the response is bad mood, suffering and enormous pain. In this way they hope to modify his behaviour, so he will suffer and feel bad when he try to hurt anyone or at least think about it.
We may even make a bold assumption and say that the treatment works. In spite of the unethical approach, we see that Alex really starts associating the crimes and violent behaviour with the feeling of his constant pain and suffering. He feel himself sick because of the injections, but he does not know that. He starts believing that it is violence that brings him such a pain and torture.
But after the constant applying of the aversion theory the researches put Alex in various provoking situations that are supposed to make him behave violently and wildly. Alex does not respond to the stimuli and behave himself peacefully as he does not want the constant pain of violence to repeat. It seems that such a wicked classical conditioning treatment works pretty nice, so Alex may be free from the jail.
As for the real life classical conditioning, Pavlov also discovered several side effects which are also mentioned by the psychiatrists in the movie. According to Pavlov, his dogs adopt some other of the stimuli and not only the ring of the bell (Schmajuk, 2008). The sound of approaching foots, appearance of human and even the colour of the professor`s clothes became the stimuli that signalized the dogs that they are supposed to be fed. In other words, all of these stimuli also called the response and they started drooling.
The fact that this side effect is exposed in the movie proved us the relationships between the aversion theory and the classical conditioning. We may notice that when Alex is suppressed by the watching of scenes of violence the classical compositions of Beethoven are played in the background becoming in this way another stimulus that will also demand a specific response (Goodfriend, 2012). And soon we see that music of Beethoven arise some controversial emotions in Alex, it makes him angry and violent as it is a part of stimulus just like a colour of professor`s clothes for the dogs.
Conclusion
In the conclusion we must say that despite the effectiveness of the classical conditioning that we observe in this piece of book adaptation, the means and tools of the aversion theory are very unethical and cannot be applied in the real life as they contradict the moral value of the human. And in the end we may also see that treatment lost its effect as Alex realize that has no reasons to be afraid of Beethoven music which means that the violence will bring him no suffering anymore.
References
Cubrick, S. & Cubrick, S. 19 December 1971. A Clockwork Orange. United States of America: Warner Bros.
Goodfriend, W. (2012). Classical Conditioning in “A Clockwork Orange”. Psychology Today. Retrieved 9 April 2016, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psychologist-the-movies/201205/classical-conditioning-in-clockwork-orange
Schmajuk, N. (2008). Classical conditioning. Scholarpedia, 3(3), 2316. http://dx.doi.org/10.4249/scholarpedia.2316
