What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [42]
The deepest problem is that ordinary Pavlovian conditioning is rational. It produces a conscious expectation that the CS will be followed by the US. But phobias are decidedly irrational. Telling a phobic that her fears are irrational (“Flying is the safest way to travel”) doesn’t dent a phobia. All of a phobic’s relatives have told her this for years, and she knows the statistics more accurately than anyone. She knows that her fears are unfounded. Cognitive therapy, unsurprisingly, does not extinguish phobias, because they are lodged in less fragile housing than reason; their roots lie deep in the unconscious. They are like my sauce béarnaise aversion, undented by my knowledge that the sauce was innocent and the flu guilty. Phobias can be undone, but not by talk.
Phobias, unlike panic disorders, are from Missouri. Their extinction requires the presentation of the phobic object without the UR of terror. Their extinction requires demonstration of harmlessness—flooding and desensitization.
I was a subject in one of Ohman’s crucial experiments in Sweden, the one demonstrating that prepared conditioning is irrational whereas ordinary conditioning is rational. He strapped my hand to a shock electrode and showed me a slide of a flower. Twenty seconds later, I felt a brief burst of shock. He repeated this five times. The next time the flower appeared, I was calm during the first few seconds. After about ten seconds, I began to tense up. My unease mounted so that by the nineteenth second I was sweating. I expected to be shocked after twenty seconds, and my fear had timed the interval. I showed ordinary Pavlovian conditioning. Very logical of me.
Ohman then showed me a picture of a python. Sort of repulsive, I thought, but I felt no fear. Twenty seconds into the picture, the same burst of shock came on. Just one pairing of shock and snake. A couple of minutes later, Ohman flashed the slide of the python a second time and I almost jumped out of my chair.
So thanks to John Garcia and Arne Ohman, we now have an accurate picture of what phobias are and what they are not. They are not instances of ordinary Pavlovian conditioning, but instances of prepared Pavlovian conditioning. They do not come about when an innocent object happens to be around precisely when a trauma befalls us. Phobias come about when certain evolutionarily prepared objects coincide roughly with danger. They are not created culturally: Man-made dangerous objects, which do not have an evolutionary history—knives and guns, for instance—condition like houses and flowers, not like dangerous objects from evolution—snakes, spiders, and scorpions.17 Just as phobias select their objects, they also select their victims. Some of us get phobias more easily than others; relatives of people with anxiety disorders, for example, are more susceptible to phobias. Phobias lurk in each of us. They are the rekindling of dark, primordial fears.
There is a profound and global message in this account. Some of what we are—our darkest fears, for example—originated early in the evolution of our species. Often we find that other parts of us resist change, even though all that is rational in us insists we change. When this happens, our evolutionary heritage is one place to find the source of the resistance. For we are not creatures of our upbringing and our culture only.
Some of what is difficult to change ties us to the life-and-death struggles of our ancestors. And it is not only our fears that are prepared. The sexual objects that we spend our lives pursuing, the aggression and competition we have such difficulty suppressing, our prejudice against people who look different from us, our masculinity or femininity, and those recurring obsessions we can’t get out of our minds are all