Martin Seligman meets William Sargant to grasp the Human Implications of Ivan Pavlov's Canine Research
Trigger Warning:
This article was written for academic and forensic professional readers. The descriptions in this article of the precise methods of mental and physical conditioning for mental and behavioral enslavement are graphic, controversial, well beyond those described most of authors in A Basic Cult Library and potentially disconcerting.
Anyone who has not arrived at the fifth of the five stages of psychotherapeutic recovery in a process of recovery from Religious / Cultic Trauma Syndrome such as this one is hereby forewarned that post-de-conversion flashbacks may occur.
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We read stories like these and wonder, “Why do they stay there? Why don’t they just get up and leave?” After many years in, around and investigating the dynamics of the CoS and other mind control cults, my experiences tell me that Ivan Pavlov (as seen through the eyes of mid-century author William Sargant) and famed psychologist Martin Seligman answered the question more than 50 years ago. Plow through the material that follows, and you may understand what “behavior modification” cults can do by the time their members have been sufficiently baited and bitten on The Typical Path of Cult Involvement.
“Pavlov’s Model of Brain Changes
“Pavlov’s dogs were almost drowned in a flood. At the last moment, an assistant rescued them, freed them from their cages, and led them to safety. Afterwards, they forgot or reversed training they had received before the trauma. Keepers they had shown affection to they now showed aggression toward. Keepers they had disliked they now showed affection for. They forgot their recent learning and had to be retrained.
“This phenomenon interested Pavlov and he studied it. He theorized that there were three stages to this breaking down of neural organization and a fourth of reassembling the world. First, the animal is overloaded, through excessive exercise, excessive sensory stimulation, surgery, or sleep deprivation. This produces what Pavlov called the “equivalent” phase of brain activity. In the “equivalent” phase all outside stimuli, large or small, produce the same size response. You may see this in people who have been sleep deprived for a day or two. They lose judgment and perspective and react to a slight question or a major challenge with the same degree of irritability.
“The second stage Pavlov called “paradoxical inhibition,” in which weak stimuli produce strong responses and strong stimuli produce weak responses. Judgment is further impaired. One almost never observes people in this state in normal life. They are responding inappropriately, with four fire engines to a firecracker and no reaction to a real four-alarm fire. This and the further stages are seen in soldiers, in civilians subjected to war, and people in normal societies subjected to rape, or other horrible traumas.
“In the third “ultra-paradoxical” stage many positive conditioned responses become negative and vice versa. The dogs showed paradoxical responses to their keepers. They became friendly to keepers they formerly disliked and disliked ones they had been close to. In people, there can be feelings of possession, hypnosis-like states, and new commands and ideas become imperative.
“The state of “transmarginal” collapse is even beyond the “ultra-paradoxical” stage. In this stage, and after it, the dog seems to have unlearned recent and longstanding routines. Pavlov described this state as one in which there is inertness, temporary inhibition of most brain function, and isolation of functionally pathological points of the cortex.
“A state of breakdown occurs in which the person or dog cannot function and has lost key markers by which they or it understood the world. Basic learning, basic assumptions about the world have been challenged. If the person or dog could change some of these assumptions, they could build a new map of the world, a different world, and function again if the trauma had not been too great. Parts of the cortex involved in the trauma become isolated from other parts of the brain they used to connect to and fire frequently and in a new manner.
“Pavlov believed this overall process was the brain’s attempt to avoid complete destruction: that it had to attempt to process trauma so great it called into question all it had ever learned. This is a model quite different from the classical conditioning for which Pavlov is usually remembered.”
Charles Swencionis, Ph.D., Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, Bronx, NY, November, 1996, at this link, which includes the complete text of Sargant, W.: Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain Washing, orig. pub. 1957, Cambridge, MA: Major Books, 1997.
“Learned Helplessness
“Experimental psychologists interested in learning have traditionally studied the behavior of animals and men faced with rewards and punishments that the subject could control. So, in a typical instrumental learning experiment, the subject can either make some response or refrain from making it and thereby influence the events around him. Nature, however, is not always so benign in its arrangement of the contingencies. Not only do we face events that we can control by our actions, but we also face many events about which we can do nothing at all. Such uncontrollable events can significantly debilitate organisms: they produce passivity in the face of trauma, inability to learn that responding is effective, and emotional stress in animals, and possibly depression in man. This review is concerned with the behavioral and psychological impact of uncontrollable traumatic events.
“Behavioral manifestations
“When an experimentally naive dog receives escape-avoidance training in a shuttle box, the following behavior typically occurs: at the onset of the first painful electric shock, the dog runs frantically about, defecating, urinating, and howling, until it accidentally scrambles over the barrier and so escapes the shock. On the next trial, the dog, running and howling, crosses the barrier more quickly than on the preceding trail. This pattern continues until the dog learns to avoid shock altogether. We have found a striking difference between this pattern of behavior and that exhibited by dogs first given uncontrollable electric shocks in a Pavlovian hammock (1, 2). Such a dog's first reactions to shock in the shuttle box are much the same as those of a naive dog. However, in dramatic contrast to a naive dog, a typical dog which has experienced uncontrollable shocks before avoidance training soon stops running and howling and sits or lies, quietly whining, until shock terminates. The dog does not cross the barrier and escape from shock. Rather, it seems to give up and passively accepts the shock. On succeeding trials, the dog continues to fail to make escape movements and takes as much shock as the experimenter chooses to give.
“There is another peculiar characteristic of the behavior of dogs which have first experienced inescapable shock. Such dogs occasionally jump the barrier early in training and escape, but then revert to taking the shock; they fail to learn that barrier-jumping produces shock-termination. In naive dogs, however, a successful escape response is a reliable predictor of future, short-latency escape responses.
“The escape-avoidance behavior of over 150 dogs which had received prior inescapable shocks has been studied. Two-thirds of these dogs do not escape; the other third escape and avoid in normal fashion. It is obvious that failure to escape is highly maladaptive since it means that the dog takes 50 seconds of severe, pulsating shock on each trial. In contrast, only 6 percent of experimentally naive dogs fail to escape in the shuttle box. So, any given dog either fails to escape on almost every trial or learns normally.
“We use the term "learned helplessness" to describe the interference with adaptive responding produced by inescapable shock and also as a shorthand to describe the process which we believe underlies the behavior (see Etiology). The phenomenon seems widespread, and such interference has been reported in dogs by a number of investigators (3-8). Nor is it restricted to dogs: deficits in instrumental responding after experience with uncontrollable shock has been shown in rats (9-20), cats (21), fish (22-24), mice (25), and men (26-27).
“Inability to control trauma not only disrupts shock escape in a variety of species, but also interferes with a range of adaptive behaviors. Rats that receive inescapable shocks initiate less pain-elicited aggression toward other rats (28), are slower to learn to swim out of a water maze (29) as are mice (25), and are poorer at food-getting behavior in adulthood when very hungry (17). Situations -involving uncontrollable events other than shock can produce effects which may be related to failure to escape shock: Escape deficits can be produced by inescapable tumbling (30), passivity following defeat in fighting (31), "sudden death" following defeat (32) or restraint (33), and retardation in learning to bar press for food following uncontrollable food (34). In addition to impairing voluntary responding, uncontrollable shock produces more stress than controllable shock as measured by behavioral suppression (37-39), by defecation and conditioned fear (35), and by subjective report (40). Finally, more weight loss, anorexia, and whole brain norepinephrine depletion is found in rats experiencing uncontrollable as opposed to controllable shock (35, 36, 41).
“In summary, experience with uncontrollable trauma typically has three basic effects: (a) animals become passive in the face of trauma, i.e., they are slower to initiate responses to alleviate trauma and may not respond at all; (b) animals are retarded at learning that their responses control trauma, i.e., if the animal makes a response which produces relief, he may have trouble "catching-on" to the response-relief contingency; and (c) animals show more stress when faced with trauma they cannot control than with equivalent controllable trauma. This maladaptive behavior appears in a variety of species including man, and over a range of tasks which require voluntary responding.”
Martin E. P. Seligman, Depts of Psychology and Psychiatry, U. of Pennsylvania, at this link.
The remainder of Seligman, M.: Learned Helplessness, in Annual Review of Medicine, Vol. 23, February 1972 -- which should be read to understand the more complete implications of cynical, ultra-authoritarian and wholly unethical manipulation of mental process -- appears at the same link.
See also Seligman, M.: Helplessness: On Depression, Development and Death, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1975.
Commentary
Both pieces above were written in the era of Watsonian / Sknnerian / Banduran "behaviorism" and reflect the knowledge of both Pavlovian -- or "classical" -- and behavioristic -- or "operant" conditioning. In the decades since then, the advent of digitally enhanced radiological scanning -- including Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging -- has made it possible to see the "default mode networks" or collections of nerve cells in which such conditioning, in-doctrine-ation, instruction, imprinting, socialization, habituation and normalization operate.
The "hot spots" in these default mode networks do not vary much from one person to the next. Various, pretty specific components of the brain's right and left hemispheric cerebral corteces, as well as the right and left hemispheric limbic emotion regulation systems (including one's hippocampal "memory funnels") are involved.
None of that was understood when Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin saw the value of funding Pavlov's further experiments in the 1920s for the purposes of operationalizing social control of the masses via installing "learned helplessness" into the minds of those who dared to challenge their totalitarian control. Nevertheless, the methods worked about as well as they would have had fMRI been available at that time.
I have not been able to locate any data on similar Communist Chinese experiments, but have determined with certainty that both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were aware of the "Soviet Method" by the early 1930s. And that Kim Il Sung was using them to stifle political opposition in North Korea in the 1950s. (See Michael Langone, Robert Jay Lifton, Edgar Schein and Alexandra Stein in A Basic Cult Library.)
Further, on the basis of what I have learned from biographical material on CoS founder LRH, it seems very likely that he was aware of Pavlov's work in detail well before he authored in his 1951 best seller, Dianetics. And it is clear to me on the basis of first-hand experience up to the seventh level of est / Forum / Landmark Education guru Werner Erhard's Cultic Pyramid that he was hip to Pavlov, as well.
Given what we know today about such as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and Keith Raniere's NXIVUM at their higher pyramidic levels, it seems probable that Sun and Raniere were similarly familiar with Pavlov's "mechanics."
For further background, see A Free online BOOK on How Cults Work.
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