aversion therapy

The example we gave, which is a topic of a dozen of long articles, illustrates well that simple questions provide for simple and, therefore, verifiable answers. But yet the value of these answers is nearly inversely proportional to their simplicity degree. In the former Soviet Union so-called aversion therapy is still popular. In the article: Sofronov, A. G. 2003 “The Up-to-Date Problems of the National Addictology” Narkologiya (3): 2–6., its origins are well-described as “explained therapy”. The idea of this approach long ago abandoned in the Western world  (in the reference literature in English I’ve found on-line only one article of 1964) is based on a very simple method: relate alcohol consumption to the vomiting reflex. Let’s remember that such approach isn’t an invention of the professional medicine, rather it’s related to folk wisdom. Like a joke (as far as I know sometimes it really happens) there’s a recipe of mother’s-in-law advice to a new wife type to help her husband give up smoking. The point is to put cut nails to a cigarette and put the cigarette back to the pack to make the husband loathe tobacco. Like we said, it’s obvious that such intuitive approaches to bind smoking or drinking to a negative alliesthesia aren’t just somewhat inhumane, but also practically ineffective. For wanting to drink and looking forward to taste some alcohol aren’t the same things. We can remember the self-medication concept at least. The alliesthesia analysis is somehow different in the framework of a wider phenomena of interoception, the aggregate of the mind reaction to internal organs signals. When we were shaping our concept of the personality structure, we meant to leave only the background function to the body. This was based on our strong belief that alcoholism is a game of the mind with itself and external world. And the body is a passive victim of this game rather than an actor.