Zap! You're Normal

Before A Clockwork Orange dealt us all a tolchock in the rot, life wasn't so bad. Sure, there were riots in the Sixties and a President who conducted his affairs of state from the throne, but once we learned to live with the eccentricities of our society and the politicians who were running it, we could sit back and enjoy. Then, suddenly, we were slooshing Beethoven while being clopped about the gulliver, viddying the old ultraviolence nonstop, and that, O my brothers, was anything but horrorshow.

In fact, it was terrifying. The song-and-dance team of Kubrick and Burgess performed a cinematic revue on the wonders of aversion therapy. We shook with fear. If this be the cure, we cried, leave us, please, to our disease. As usual, the media were the last to catch on and the first to freak. Magazines ran frightening, gut-wrenching articles on the techniques of behavior modification; it turned out that aversion therapy was only one of the weapons the mad scientists were preparing to unleash on the populace. They were out there among us at this very moment shocking homosexuals into the straight life, shocking straights into fagdom, grilling autistic children, blowing smoke up the nostrils of smokers. It seemed, if we were to believe what we read, that the proper amount of pain applied to the proper aberration produced remarkable rehabilitating effects. Or so said the behavior modifiers. Worse yet, these psychologists had proof, and where was the proof of their archenemies, the Freudian psychoanalysts? The traditional shrinks had none to offer. They had a neat little phrase for every conceivable neurotic manifestation of the fucked-up psyche, but, unlike their electrode-equipped cousins, they could only speculate on the success and failure of their ventures into detraumatizing humanity. When in doubt, there was always an unresolved conflict in the lower intestinal tract ready and waiting to explain away the most abstruse compulsions and obsessions.

If people were stunned to learn that behavior modification had been around a long time before Kubrick and Burgess uncorked it, and that aversion therapy was only one of its techniques, imagine their surprise to learn that the mod squad—as its young practitioners are called—seems to be swiftly gaining ground on the Freudians. What can you say after you say he's crazy? Freudians traditionally have said plenty and written reams. Members of the mod squad, on the other hand, say little. Instead, they apparently jot down data on the frequency of the craziness and then, without a word, they set out to do something about it. But who, exactly, are these dudes behind the electrode buttons? Are they as demented as the Neo-Nazis who tried to frazzle Alex into an upstanding citizen? Or are they regular chello-vecks like you and me?

A trip around the country to some of their unlikely haunts produces a few answers and a few surprises of its own. There is little you need to know in advance, only that behaviorism began in earnest shortly before World War Two, when B.F. Skinner, the squad's guru, ran his first pigeon through a weird contraption and discovered that he could control the frequency and duration of the bird's pecking by positive and negative reinforcement. He called it operant conditioning. Excepting a cozy little box that he built for his daughter, Skinner stayed with birds, taught them all sorts of acrobatic feats and left others to experiment with people. Not that Skinner lacked ideas on the subject of human conditioning: In Walden Two, Science and Human Behavior and, most recently, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he has repeatedly informed us that we are all being engineered to peck at pellets, whether we like it or not. With great persuasion he shows us exactly how, when and why we are controlled in our daily lives. Nobody, of course, wants to hear; it is like learning that you have several million body lice building nests in your armpits at this very moment.

Today Skinnerian theory is being put into practice in thousands of public schools throughout America and, among other places, in an alcoholics' unit in a state hospital in California, in a class for retarded ghetto kids in Georgia and in a rural Southern prison. If the young mod-squad dynamos who are running these programs have any characteristic in common, it is a refreshing lack of cant and pretension.

They make no claims to a more profound understanding of man's essential nature than the janitor who empties their trash cans; they claim nothing but the knowledge of a technique that (continued on page 90) Zap! (continued from page 87) demonstrably works to change behavior patterns. Once implemented, they say, it works independently of the psychologist.

The mod squad posits that most behavior is learned behavior and that it is maintained and defined by the environment in which it occurs through a process of conditioning. One is rewarded or punished, positively or aversely reinforced, and these reinforcements—some subtle, some over—are what determine how one behaves in any given situation. To change behavior, then, either a behaviorist changes the environment in which it occurs or, failing that, he changes the person's perception of that environment. As a behavior therapist, he does not subject his patient to endless free-association sessions on a Naugahyde couch, he does not allow his patient to dwell on childhood traumas. What motivates a man to eat dirt, for instance, may be a deep psychic drive, but it is an unmeasurable commodity and, more important—essential, in fact, to behavior modification—it does not have to be fully or even partially understood to permanently change the aberrant behavior that it precipitates.

Of the numerous branches of applied psychology, behavior modification alone derives from laboratory experiments. Because of this, it staggers under the weight of a technical language sufficiently dehumanized to scare the living hell out of any creature with ears. Successive approximation, operant conditioning, desensitization, discriminative stimuli, deprivation schedules, aperiodic reinforcement—these are but a few of the terms that season the incidental conversations of behavior therapists. If ever a group of individuals needed to reshape its public image, the mod squad shares first rung with the Flat Earth Society, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Association of Phrenologists. Fortunately, it has among its members a therapist with a comedic gift and a flair for the risqué that are serving to capture the hearts and minds of the doubtful masses. He exists somewhere between Pavlov and Soupy Sales, a 40-year-old bachelor from the slums of Boston who now lives and works in California, where he runs the Behavior Institute of Marin. His name is David Fisher.

"There's one thing you learn when you work with human behavior day in and day out, bubbe," he says. "You learn humility. The Government, the environment don't provide me with the kind of tools I need to help every alcoholic or homosexual who walks through the door. They don't provide any rewards for a guy who's been on a binge for five years, a guy who wakes up stinking in some alley with a hangover and no teeth. What's he got to look forward to? Has he got a wife and kids and a place to come home to? Where are his rewards? Jesus Christ, in my office I can run him through an hour of aversive reinforcement. I can make drinking extremely distasteful to him, but when he steps outside, bubbe, when he's back on the street, I've got ten thousand bars and ten thousand mirrors working against me. You're a skid-row bum, you look at yourself, the drool and stubble, you're gonna reach for a bottle of Ripple quick. I'm not going to tell you I can knock over an elephant with a bean blower, for Christ's sake!"

Fisher is just getting warmed up. He has popped out of his chair and is pacing the room, jabbing the air with the tip of a cane he uses to support an ankle he twisted while skiing. When he begins to smoke, his black eyes flash like laser beams under a thick gnarled hedge of eyebrow, his hand repeatedly disappears into his bushy hair after a mysterious itch, he tugs hard at the point of his full beard; the socketed eyes, the darkly Semitic features, the inflamed rhetoric suggest to you an archetypal mad scientist. But there is more going on here, there are unexpected crescendos, easy laughs, sudden pauses, deftly turned phrases and, above all, an immaculate sense of timing that suggests a masterful persuader with revolutionary zeal.

"I happen to belong to a profession that is impervious to facts," he says, alluding to the Neo-Freudians. "If a psychiatrist's treatment is not working, it is not the patient's fault. The fault is in the treatment. In behavior therapy, if the procedure isn't working, we change it. The procedure's simple. The difficulty is in learning how to implement it for each particular person. The whole medical model of psychotherapy is bullshit; it implies that the psychiatrist knows more about what's wrong with you than you do, bubbe. Can you imagine if I'm a surgeon and my patient has the discourtesy to die on me and I put down as the reason 'death wish'? I write that once and I'll never hold another scalpel. But every day, psychiatrists' patients are jumping out of twelfth story windows or off the Golden Gate Bridge, and these alter kakers are writing in their books, 'death wish.' Well, we know he had a death wish, bubbe, he jumped off the fucking bridge. Why didn't you do something before he jumped?"

As Fisher loops and stabs his cane for emphasis, you glance out the window. A sparkling starlet wiggles past in magenta sunglasses, a caravan of tourists chugs along toward Doris Day's dressing room. No, you are not hallucinating, you are sitting in a gray-slate bungalow on the lot of Universal Studios, where Fisher, for recreation, has been consulting on a film that his brother-in-law, a director, has just completed. In his office is another foreigner to showbiz, Dr. Halmuth Schaefer, whose recent behavior-modification work with alcoholics at the Patton State Hospital outside San Bernardino is gaining recognition. Before Fisher took to the cane, Schaefer was quietly explaining his research, but now he, too, sits back and listens without a word. He doesn't seem to mind; his wife, perched demurely on the arm of a fiberglass chair, doesn't seem to mind and you certainly don't mind: Fisher in action is great fun. So you just sit back and, umm, positively reinforce the gentleman with smiles and nods.

He is now speaking of sex deviates, exhibitionists, fetishists and other aberrants. He mentions the pioneer behavior-therapy work in this area of Dr. Joseph Wolpe in Philadelphia, and Wolpe's development of desensitization techniques, and then, in the middle of a sentence, he stops, he turns. "Hey, bubbe, by the way," he says, "you know why the vast majority of sexual deviates are males? Because our peckers are outside, male kids are getting hard-ons long before they get turned on by women; they get hard-ons shimmying up trees or rubbing against tables or climbing ladders. So what stimulus is the erection being paired with? A naked woman? No. A table, a desk, a chair. Is it so amazing, then, if a guy grows up and finds himself hanging out all day long in furniture stores with his pecker doing a cha-cha against his belly button? We're always pairing stimuli in our heads without realizing it."

Fine, let's talk about desks. Let's say a guy comes to see you who's hung up on desks. As his therapist, what do you do?

"I countercondition him. I might run slides of desks of every shape, size and dimension. If he finds himself getting turned on, I'll give him a shock. It's the kind of aversive reinforcement I might use with homosexuals, running slides of naked men and women. First I have them tell me how they feel about what they're looking at. If they get any kind of arousal at all from looking at a picture of a woman, you know you have a chance to help them. You reward that response and try to extinguish their homosexual arousal. Rewarding appropriate behavior is always as important as punishing inappropriate behavior. Some behavior therapists use a plethysmograph, which measures penis volume—a small ring with electronic sensors that fits over the tip. You see, the glands don't lie. A patient can see for himself by the graph what is turning him on, even though he may not be aware of it for a minute or two. As we develop more sophisticated measuring devices---" (continued on page 184) Zap! (continued from page 90)

One second, you interrupt, for your fascination and awe are quickly giving way to nausea as Clockwork Orange images dance a mad fandango before your eyes. There is something...terrible... about this; no matter what its therapeutic value, there is something goddamn indecent about all this shocking of innocents and measuring of erectile tissue, because, hell, we're not laboratory rats, we're people!

Drs. Fisher and Schaefer smile with the soft resignation of men who have heard it all many times before.

"I don't want to go to my grave with it written on my tomb that I gave seventeen thousand men erections and lost seven thousand," Fisher replies. "I don't like to think of that as my contribution to Western civilization. I'd much rather discuss self-actualization and the purpose of life with my patients. I wouldn't be devoting my life to this except for one thing—it works."

Schaefer has moved to the edge of his chair. "I don't want it to be said that I decreased the elbow-bending rate of five thousand alcoholics as my contribution. But, goddamn it, I don't want it to be said, either, that I cured five hundred compulsions. In fifty years, that will seem as ridiculous as witch doctors do today. What we commonly call compulsion is nothing more than a behavior of high strength. As behaviorists, we won't deny there may be inner devils in man, but we're not satisfied to name them and think that by doing so, we've cured the man."

"Change the behavior first, bubbe," Fisher asserts, "and you'll often find you've changed a person's self-knowledge. Not vice versa."

At Patton State Hospital, where he worked until recently under a research grant, Schaefer set up a realistic lower-class bar and cocktail lounge to study the behavior of alcoholics in vitro (in an observable environment but under conditions as much as possible like those under which they normally drink). With the cooperation of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, he stocked his bar with the best and worst of confiscated booze. At the time, he saw abstinence as the only possible alternative to excessive drinking. He set out to pair a physiologically harmless but painful finger shock with drinking alcohol. After a dozen drinking-shock sessions, Schaefer found that the alcoholic could withstand, with only minor flinching, shock levels that both he and the attending physician found extremely painful. He also discovered that he was producing no substantial change in drinking behavior that would last after discharge from the hospital. The experiment, in short, failed abysmally.

However, upon reviewing the experimental data, Schaefer and his staff noted a preference among alcoholics for straight alcohol (60 percent) as opposed to mixed drinks (31 percent). In a further experiment, involving volunteer "social drinkers" from the community, Schaefer discovered that only 15 percent of us take our spirits straight, that 81 percent of normal drinkers prefer mixed drinks. More significantly, he discovered that alcoholics take much larger gulps than social drinkers, who tend to sip and chat and watch the ice melt. Alcoholics, in fact, consume two or three times as much hooch per sip, and continue to drink even when they're reeling, retching and slurring Melancholy Baby. Before attempting to train alcoholics to become social drinkers by regulating the length and amount of their sips, Schaefer and his colleagues tried another experiment. They video-taped alcoholics while drinking and then played back the tapes when their subjects were relatively sober. Alcoholics, viewing their own sodden, boorish, drunken behavior—which, like the rest of us, they probably thought was witty and devastatingly funny at the time—go through many changes, but the changes are only in their verbal behavior. "I'll never drink again," they say, "if that's the way I look." "I didn't know I acted so effeminate when I drink," they say. "That's the last time for me. I'm off from now on."

The sobering truth, in fact, is that every one of the alcoholics who viewed themselves on tape relapsed into his previous drinking behavior upon discharge from the hospital. The self-confrontation sessions seemed to increase their anxiety; and when an alcoholic is anxious, he reaches for a bottle. What was lacking in Schaefer's experiment was a therapeutic-counseling situation for the alcoholic confronting himself on tape. The alcoholic, seeing himself at his worst, is ready for some sort of constructive help in seeking an alternative life style.

Schaefer's solution was to devise an avoidance technique by which the alcoholics—volunteers, as in all behavior experiments—would receive no shocks if they drank like average social drinkers, would receive mild shocks for mild deviations and strong shocks for major violations, such as chugaluging a straight Scotch. The shocks were administered by female assistants seated on adjacent bar stools, which appears to be a peculiar pairing unless you plan to turn out a roomful of winos who hate women. In any case, after five sessions, there was a dramatic decrease in the number of straight drinks ordered by the subjects, a decrease in gulping and an increase in sipping. The subjects were told in advance of the shock contingencies (consequences) but not of the amount constituting a sip as opposed to a gulp. Four of the subjects threw down their glasses and tottered off after a few sessions. The remaining nine were taking seven or more sips per drink by the 14th session, and they never consumed more than three drinks per session. A follow-up six weeks after release from the hospital indicated that two of the nine had fully sustained their social-drinking behavior.

Leaning back in his seat, Schaefer tells you that the results of his experiments are frankly inconclusive. Such mechanical nonverbal avoidance conditioning can't be used alone to cure alcoholism, it would seem. On the other hand, there is some indication that abstinence is not the only alternative to alcoholism.

But why encourage social drinking?

"Social drinking is engrained in our culture," Schaefer says. "I'm sure you know the way people look at you when you're not drinking at a cocktail party. I'm interested in helping alcoholics readjust to normal social situations, and alcohol is often very much a part of them."

• • •

Something tells you that no form of therapy for our imperfections can stand alone in total isolation from the therapist. An insensitive doctor may perform a delicate appendectomy, but emotions aren't so docile. They would seem to demand more than a strategic shock applied here and there by an indifferent technician. Graphs and charts suggest that the techniques of behavior therapy seem to work for many personality disorders and that, in principle, these techniques work independently of the therapist. Instinct, however, tells you that principle and practice are two different animals and that the personality of a behavior therapist might have much more to do with his patient's recovery than any chart, diagram or behavior therapist would suggest. A therapist like Fisher certainly strengthens the suspicion, his energy and exuberance being as infectious and inevitable as the marijuana munchies. You sense that patients want to be helped by such a man. It would be insulting to stay sick.

"They came to me years ago," he explains. "They had a little problem of homosexuality in San Quentin, they wanted to know, could I help them? I told them yeah, I can help. They fell all over themselves, they were delighted. But I said, one thing: I need women. Their jaws dropped. How the hell do they expect to change homosexuality in prisons unless they're willing to change the environment that provokes it? [A thump of the cane.] Where the hell were we thirty years ago, when psychologists should have been arguing for conjugal visits? We were getting fat Federal grants to advise the Government to build more comfortable prisons and lots of fancy mental clinics, and instead we should have been saying, 'Fuck the new mental clinics, you alter kakers, pay us to help you change the miserable conditions of living in a slum that produce the wounded and sick and crippled in our society! Give people something to live for!'"

His face contorted in anger, Fisher stops. He relaxes his muscles, he taps the cane lightly against the base of a floor lamp and rubs his nose and smiles.

As Fisher moves to sit down, Schaefer's wife catches his eye. In a hushed, deeply resonant voice, she says, "I'm so glad we have you as a guardian for our children, David, in case Hal and I should ever have and accident."

• • •

The woman beside you is the color of a geranium, her fingers are clutched tensely in her lap and her breathing is a series of sputters and wheezes. A veteran Los Angeles elementary teacher, she has come to the UCLA lecture series hoping to pick up on some new behavior-modification techniques: Lately, Joey in the third row behind Mary Alice has been reaching over and sticking his finger up the girl's nose, and he's not responding to any disciplinary measures. She knows about rewarding kids with M&Ms for good deportment, but finger-sticking Joey hates candy. Maybe the gentleman at the podium will have some suggestions. He's dressed quite...spiffily...isn't he?...and his beard is neatly trimmed...and he smiles pleasantly and.... Oh, my goodness! He's just quoted Lenny Bruce's obscene definition of a homosexual and...she can feel the moisture gathering under her arms; how does one make a graceful exit from the middle of this row?...Oh, my goodness! He just said something about a male organ doing a cha-cha.... Now he's scratching his head like a chimp, he's imitating an exhibitionist opening his fly and.... Why is she laughing, this is the most vulgar display of...ha! Oh, dear, that was cute...rather refreshingly candid, isn't he? And so dynamic....

The middle-aged teacher and 200 other women in subtle variations of her printed-cotton dress flash a hasty glance toward the exits, clench and unclench their hands as the man with the awful tongue launches into his fragmented discursive lecture on foster children. Five minutes later, they have eased back into their seats, their nervous titters have swelled into healthy chuckles, they are being assaulted by a stunning example of the type of dirty, irreverent humor that is corrupting the youth of our nation. And they love it.

Fisher, surprisingly, doesn't know they love it. He knows only that he has something to tell these teachers and social workers and school counselors, something of vital importance about working with problem kids, and to make them listen, he has to shake them up a little. He's been shaking them up for years, in therapy sessions and for a time on a San Francisco radio talk show, until the station management ran him off the air. He's been swearing at them, cajoling them—doing everything in his arsenal to make people in positions of social responsibility more attentive to the needs of "the wounded and crippled and sick in our society." They are the agents of change, they are the ones he has to reach.

Tonight he is speaking specifically about a local county-funded pilot program at the Behavior Institute of Marin designed to teach foster parents the basics of behavior modification. Foster kids, he says, are among the most disturbed in the country; they include Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Manson, and the turnover for the toughest kids is about 80 percent a year. Nobody wants them, nobody knows what to do with them. Psychologists aren't going to change their behavior, because psychologists don't live with them; foster parents do. They are the kids' environment, they are the agents of change. You want to change the kid, bubbe, change the parents' relationship to him.

The parents with whom Fisher and his staff work under the pilot program have "problem" foster children—with problems like wetting their pants 20 times a day, shoving their heads into a steaming bowl of spaghetti, pulling the ears off rabbits, urinating on the living-room wall. The foster parents—who receive a reward of Blue Chip stamps for attending the learning sessions—are taught first to keep a record of their child's antisocial behavior. They are then taught to stifle their normal impulse to rant and rave and scold when that behavior occurs, for their outrage acknowledges the behavior, and the kid, above all, wants to be acknowledged. They are taught to extinguish bad behavior by not responding to it and to acknowledge the kid's good behavior by rewarding it with, for instance, gold stars that can be accumulated and traded in for an ice-cream cone. They are also taught to make the child aware of the consequences of peeing on a living-room wall. One consequence is that somebody has to clean it up. The kid is handed a sponge. One day he makes a swipe in the general direction of the stain. He is lauded with praise (a social reinforcer) and goodies (a material reinforcer) and in time begins to look after himself. The material reinforcers are gradually phased out.

Later, driving away from the UCLA campus, Fisher leans back and utters a long low moan. "See what I mean about giving lectures? It doesn't do any good, it doesn't change anybody. I don't know why I get so worked up."

You mention that the audience seemed to be responsive.

"Really?" He looks surprised.

After a few minutes of silence, Fisher unbuttons his shirt collar. "I swore too much again," he says. "I shouldn't swear."

• • •

One of Fisher's patients is a lean, attractive woman in her mid-20s who has never achieved an orgasm with a man. "I went to shrinks for years," she says. "There were incredibly long periods of silence. Twenty, thirty minutes at a time. Nothing happened, I was still attracting men, going to bed with them, and then breaking off the relationship as soon as I did, the way a man is supposed to discard a woman after he's made her. I tried group therapy; it loosened me up a little, but it didn't really help me come to terms with my sex problem. I tried free love for a while; I got into that Haight-Ashbury scene. Forget it. Free love is like picking up a revolver and shooting it at the first person who walks past. It wasn't for me.

"What's David's therapy? Well, he sits me in this chair that leans back, he attaches a lie-detector thingamajig to my arm and helps me relax by making me feel the weight of the chair—a little like meditation exercises. If I went to Masters and Johnson, they'd have me bring in a surrogate lover and I might solve my sex problem more quickly. But I haven't quite adjusted to the idea, and I don't want to be able to achieve orgasm with only one person. Fisher doesn't use surrogates. But he's a real matchmaker," the woman laughs, delicately sweeping her frilly blonde hair away from her eyes. "He's always trying to fix me up. Once he told me he knew this great guy who had a Learjet. Another time he recommended a guy with a huge stone house on a hill. So far, I've refused. I don't date men, I just sorta meet them. David's funny—he's hip, but in a way he's right out of the Fifties, thinking I'd dig a guy on account of his Learjet.

"The main thing for me about David's therapy, though, is that he really makes me feel good. He makes me feel alive. I believe you need a sense of humor to get through life, and he has one. In five years of seeing a psychoanalyst, I never laughed once. Fisher's also concerned. When he discovered that I was driving cars to Portland on the weekends to earn money for his therapy fees, he blew up. He wouldn't hear of it. He insisted on lowering his fee so that I could continue to go to school and see him without screwing up my weekends."

All this, you reply, doesn't sound a hell of a lot like behavior therapy. It sounds more like psychologist Carl Rogers' patient-centered therapy, which on paper is a markedly different approach.

"Maybe," she says, twirling her hair around her finger, "but David's always spitballing—what he calls improvising. I guess he thinks of behavior therapy as doing whatever you can to make the person more self-assertive and self-assured; he's not all that hung up on definitions."

There are some patients who find Fisher's reinforcement techniques too transparent, superficial and somewhat silly. One middle-aged housewife with doubts about herself as a sexual being remarks that he strutted about his office like a rooster, coming on so strongly she felt uncomfortable—his attempt to build up her ego rankled her and she left after a few sessions.

Fisher worries about the ones he hasn't been able to help. He worries, too, about some of the ones he could help, but won't. "I get these rich guys in here sometimes, these incredibly self-centered kids who want to get straightened out so they can go fuck every woman in sight without feeling guilty. Their sensitivity stops right at the end of their shlong. As politely as I can, I tell them to get lost. Or I get a fascist in here with a facial tic. Sure I can cure his tic, but when he leaves he's still going to be a fascist. So what have I done? I've given the world a fascist without a facial tic. At moments like that, I wonder what the hell my profession is all about. I think of closing my private practice, but the money from it helps support our work with foster parents. By the way, I'm not a rich man. My staff determines my salary. Listen, I'll get back to you later; there's a guy in the waiting room who's planning to go up on Coit Tower and shoot everybody in sight. What, bubbe? What will I do? Well, first I'll have him draw up a list of all the shits he wants to kill, then at least we'll have something to argue about. I might want to add a few myself."

• • •

At the other extreme of behavior therapy are the practitioners with no particular flair for public relations; like Ivar Lovaas of UCLA, they are usually engaged in using highly unpopular techniques and suffer the consequences of a bad press.

Critics of behavior therapy—among them Bruno Bettelheim—rank Lovaas among the all-time heavies, right up there with Fu Manchu, Oddjob and Lucrezia Borgia. His crime against humanity has been to shock autistic children, painfully and repeatedly. Once he did nice things—he taught mute kids to talk by rewarding them for attentiveness, and then taught this procedure to nurses, students and parents. Everybody liked him in those days. But suddenly he lost his head, he began to get nasty, he began to frazzle youngsters. There oughta be a law.

There is, in fact, a law, a behavioral law concerning operant conditioning, and Lovaas is patiently explaining it to a professional audience. He is describing how he happened to come upon aversive conditioning for autistic children. One day while he was on the phone, an autistic girl was banging her head against a table so loudly he couldn't hear. In a brief display of temper, he slapped her on the rear end. She stopped banging her head for almost a minute. Although history may not equate it with Fleming's accidental discovery of penicillin, it was for Lovaas a moment of great revelation. In the daily work he'd been doing with autistic children for over a year, he had failed to stop their self-destructive behavior for more than a few seconds. Then, wham! One cuff of the hand and a whole new vista opened.

Lovaas realizes that it is just about impossible for any human being to accept the morality of subjecting children to aversive conditioning in the form of electric shocks, and so with only a few introductory words, he dims the house lights and switches on a movie projector. On the screen an autistic boy is shown with heavy padding above the arms—he has bitten his shoulder down to the bone; another boy wears mittens—he has punched himself in the face so severely that great red welts encompass his cheeks and eyes; an autistic girl who slams her head against a table at the rate of 20 times a minute has scar tissue on her forehead two inches thick; a little girl about six lacks two fingers on her left hand—she has chewed them off. These are but a few of the autistics Lovaas is treating.

The film puts it to you quite simply: What is preferable, a shock or a lifetime of self-mutilation? As Lovaas presents them, the alternatives may be oversimplified, but he makes a strong case for his techniques. He illustrates the specifics of his approach with graphs, charts and zigzag equations, all of which indicate that punishment (a shock) effectively diminishes self-destructive behavior in autistics when it is applied immediately, even in minute quantities. In order to operate in this manner, it is necessary to subdue one's basic instincts. Only a fiend would not respond to head banging by rushing over and embracing the child. But operant conditioning tells you that behavior is maintained by its consequences, so if you plan to change self-destructive behavior, you had better stop rewarding it with a warm embrace. You save your affection for the moments when the child is not maiming himself, that being the behavior to encourage.

It isn't easy, and it doesn't convince Lovaas' critics. They claim that all this pseudoscientific rubbish ignores the process of "self-actualization," the process of discovery by which a child develops his own individual personality. They claim that Lovaas is turning these kids into conditioned monkeys, and the fury with which they attack him suggests in part that they are highly intimidated by the apparent success of his techniques.

For better or worse, Lovaas knows what he's about and brings to his therapy a wealth of laborious preparation and a high degree of sanity. However, the shock grid will still be there, no matter who is pushing the buttons—an unskilled layman or an expert who just happens to have flipped his gourd. And what then? If you can jolt a sick child into a healthy frame of mind, you can conversely buzz a normal kid into a freak who chews up his fingers in order to avoid punishment. It is hardly the sort of thing that anyone likes to think about. But as the techniques for behavior manipulation continue to improve, there is no choice but to expend an equal amount of energy learning how to counteract them. We are off on another variation of the antiballistic-missile spiral. Hopefully, somewhere in the galaxy there exists a race that has already worked out all of these problems. With any luck they will soon land on earth and put us straight. In the meantime we are left to combat our own technological advances, and the weaker among us seem to bear the burden of our experiments.

It is the weak, after all, who usually wind up in narcotics units or in prison, where occasionally we make an honest effort to rehabilitate them. Such efforts are ripe for the latest behavioristic innovation. In one alcoholics' ward at Mendocino State Hospital in California, a husband and wife have been trying out their version of behavior modification. It includes a "Throw-up Room," plastered with clippings of words and phrases like loser, white trash, uncultured, broompusher, creep—unpleasant things that alcoholics sometimes call themselves. The theory being pushed here is that when alcoholics are confronted daily by these "punishers" they will become desensitized and will avoid drinking as an escape. The husband and wife team, Ken and Jo Swift, affect Indian sandal–hip clothes, and issue forth a peculiar porridge of behavioristic jargon, Gurdjieff philosophy and down-home logic. Says Jo, "If I burn Ken's steak he won't say to me 'Stop burning my steak.' He'll say to himself, 'When I told her to hurry up and feed me, I gave her an aversive stimulus and she responded by burning my steak.'"

You may choose never to accept a dinner invitation from the Swifts; you may, for that matter, conclude that 90 percent of what they have to say is unadorned bullshit. But a visit to their alcoholics unit suggests that in spite of the rhetoric they are accomplishing their goal, which is to reshape an alcoholic's sodden image of himself. Their commitment to helping life's losers is thorough, their eclectic techniques employed with overwhelming sincerity. "Good!" "Great!" "Right on!" "Far out!" the staff constantly shouts at the patients. Sometimes a patient shouts back, "Fuck you!" and runs for the bottle. But most seem to pick up on the Swifts' outpouring of behavioristic-cosmic-who-knows-what energy. A 6'2" ex-boozer tells you, "I've been a shrinking-violet type all my life. Now I come to see I've been making the wrong noises to myself. I don't need the hooch; I'm hooked on Skinner."

• • •

One pauses to imagine what history might have been like if behavior therapists had been working their wonders down through the ages. Martin Luther, learning to love Catholicism, would tear up his 95 theses and throw them in the wastebasket; Michelangelo, wired to a galvanic skin-response mechanism and a plethysmograph, would overcome his homosexual guilt feelings and give up the arts for a more respectable profession; under the principles of desensitization, and with the aid of color slides, Napoleon would lose his urge to conquer. There would be no Protestantism, no David, no War and Peace; just a bunch of mellow folk living in happy harmony with their environment.

But enough of this foppishness. Way down south in Wetumpka, Alabama, a team of behaviorists has gained considerable respect among colleagues and prison authorities by implementing modsquad techniques at the Draper Correctional Center. Again, the subjects of their experiments are people most prone to be institutionalized, criminals who in many cases have given up on themselves as a bad bet. The token-economy system that these behaviorists have employed in one cell block at Draper is an outgrowth of work done by two of behaviorism's founding fathers, Nathan Azrin and Teodoro Ayllon, who established the first large-scale token-economy system a dozen years ago in a psychotics' ward. Ayllon—whose customized clothes and penchant for parties do much to belie the popular image of drab social scientists—came across one woman in that ward who had been hoarding towels for nine years. Instead of trying to take them away, he had nurses deliver dozens of towels to her room every day. Soon, with 600 towels to fold and stack, she O.D.ed on her obsession and began flinging towels out of her room until, exhausted, she was down to one towel. Although Ayllon has contributed more significantly to the field of behavior modification, and has since taken his token-economy system into ghetto schools in Georgia to treat learning disabilities, he seems destined to be remembered above all else as the man who took towels out of linen closets and brought them into the folklore of behavior therapy.

The token-economy system that he helped to develop is an exercise in simple logic. As it works at Draper, under the direction of Dr. John McKee, tangible rewards are given for appropriate behavior. An inmate collects token points for maintaining a neat appearance, by attending vocational-skill classes and programed-learning sessions, by completing work assignments—and at the end of the day he can trade in these token points for a pack of cigarettes or a snack in the cell block's store. Recreational facilities also cost points. An inmate deposits a check before entering the TV room for a little tube time. If he runs out of token points, he borrows from the "bank" and pays interest on his loan. The idea behind all this is to teach prisoners the thorny game of capitalism. Units of labor are traded for currency, and currency is traded for whatever gets you stoned, fat or happy.

Being no fools, McKee and his staff realize that their token-economy system may help inmates better adapt to the routine of prison life, but that prison life provides a poor model for making it out in the community. There is no one around to feed you three meals a day or to award you points for combing your hair when you arrive back on the street. What to do, then? The behaviorists wanted to set up a simulated city within the prison, where they could create the same jobs and social pressures that one might find in a small village. It was a great idea, but it never happened. There was a change in prison administration, the new regime seemed less sympathetic to these newfangled notions than the previous regime; after two years, McKee and company have suddenly found themselves in the process of moving out of Draper and back into the community to work with "youthful offenders," kids who screw up at a tender age.

They leave behind a group of convicts who have mellowed considerably as a result of their programs. They leave behind a group of prison guards who no longer arbitrarily punish prisoners for nonperformance. The guards have been paid to go back to school and learn the basics of behavior modification; they have discovered that the token-economy system makes their job a hell of a lot easier. One of them was described by a prisoner as "the sorriest motherfucker I ever seen." The training program apparently put him through some changes. "Now," says the prisoner, "the difference in Fred is daylight to dark. He's right human. I mean I can even talk to that dude."

• • •

It turns out that behavior modification is happening all over this crazy country of ours, that in the span of a dozen years it has already bypassed most conventional forms of therapy, that teachers, doctors, clergymen, housewives and baby sitters are now talking about primary and secondary reinforcers with the casual assurance of old pros. Is behavior modification then yet another fad like the Hula-Hoop and the Frisbee? Probably not. It takes some of the guesswork out of human inadequacy. It applies an engineer's expertise to the mysteries of the id. Bureaucrats love it. At long last they can see graphic evidence of what all these nutty mental-health people are up to.

Critics, on the other hand, foresee a "nightmare of manipulation" in the future of this social science. One of them, psychologist Carl Rogers, an eloquent and gentle man, wants no part of a world in which "persons could be developed, enhanced or facilitated or...weakened and disintegrated." MIT's Noam Chomsky took up most of an issue of The New York Review of Books to let B. F. Skinner know exactly how much he despised Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Among Skinner's other critics, believe it or not, is Spiro Agnew, whom many consider to be our foremost expert in shaping social malaise into voting power by a clever manipulation of his own verbal behavior.

Skinner and his disciples have been arguing all along that what they seek to do is to replace punishment with positive reinforcement as an effective means of control. Aversion therapy is reserved solely for extreme behavioristic problems. Naturally, many of us assume that they are trying to con us into accepting their demonic, fascist ideas. "The crucial problem in understanding man," writes Rollo May, "is not what attributes he shares with the horse or dog, but what constitutes him uniquely as man, as human being."

Another well-known opponent, psychiatrist Leslie Farber, says, "To treat an animal as though he possessed this capacity [to perceive good and evil] is merely silly, but to treat a human being as though he were only his behavior is, I am afraid, wicked."

You are left to wonder, in conclusion, whether Dr. Farber and others consider it wicked to be part of a society that packs up its crazies and ships them off to mental institutions many miles from nowhere, at a safe remove from our daily thoughts, and where Thorazine and other drugs are administered to zonk these nuisances into a state of glazed tranquillity. You wonder, too, whether Dr. Farber considers it wicked to belong to a profession that specializes in treating those who are most capable of paying for the treatment.

What is wicked depends on where you stand in relationship to it. From the point of view of a young generation of Americans, the society they live in, a society that has raised them to believe in honesty and compassion and yet rewards lying and hypocrisy in government and business, is damned wicked. From another point of view, the great strength of behaviorism is its amorality. It asserts that people profit most by paying attention to the actuality of their relationships, without being ravaged by moralistic cramps and anxieties. It asserts that people profit most by being open and clear with one another, and with themselves. It makes no ethical judgment on good and bad, right and wrong in any abstract sense. The ethics of the mod squad are the ethics of a conscientious whore, and the ethics of a conscientious whore—despite all that we have read in books and heard from pulpits—are often more pure and noble than those of the God-fearing forces that salute flags and kill others in the name of religion or political ideology.