Not many people know what is conditional reflex therapy of alcoholism. A brief report. This is the Soviet know-how of the 1960s developed with the naive but noble purpose of infusing a persistent aversion to alcohol to the domestic alcoholic. Technically, everything was very simple. A man, ten of the soldiers who entered the path of correction, were planted around a large pond, given to drink at a point, and immediately poured a half-cube of apomorphine (hearted, unlike their barley relative, morphine). A minute later, ten stalls were filled to the edges, and they all scattered around the chambers. After five such executions, a few impressive patients actually had something close to the aversion to vodka, which, being unsupported by further sessions, remarkably self-healed in a couple of weeks.
The method has not survived. The most brilliant criticism of conditional reflex therapy I heard from my patient, Yuri Petrovich. When I asked him at a lecture in front of a group of students if he had come across such a technique, he stunned, rightly noted that the man is not a Pavlov dog, and that the drinking denaturate will not become frightened about that disgusting vodka or not. In general, the method is unpredictable and can lead to completely unexpected side effects. Upon the suggestion to clarify what he meant, Yuri Petrovich told how many years ago he had a wonderful evening with a friend for four bottles of vodka and a kind of snack consisting of an onion, two pieces of black bread and ten cans of sprat. Our hero at the time served as an officer on a military ship, so having gathered the will in his fist, an untreated but straight-walking, returned to the ship at half-and-a-half and turned off in his cabin with a sense of duty. One hour later there was a training alarm. In a six-point storm, the ship went out into the open ocean.
Yuri Petrovich is a wonderful storyteller. During three minutes of his monologue, he carried the breathing audience through all the circles of Hell. With costly, but absolutely accurate styles, he painted a monumental canvas called “I want to die, only so that it all ends.” Rising to the maximum emotional impetus, to the very crucifixion, the storyteller suddenly silenced, removed his glasses and began to wrap the blue isolant attaching the broken arches.
I cautiously asked, “What about conditional reflex therapy?”
Yuri Petrovich, a weaker long-standing Russian intellectual, who lived a humiliated life as a Soviet alcoholic, but who did not lose something that either existed or did not exist, looked at me with regret and said: “After this incident, I could not watch for ten years.”