had been transformed, by a combination of his “Pavlovian conditioning” plus

standard reward responses, into distinct and different patterns. As the waters

of the flood came up and receded, many dogs reached a point where they had

almost no airspace between their noses and the tops of their cages. This

subjected them to maximum stress. Immediately thereafter, Pavlov noticed that

many of the dogs were no longer behaving as they had. The dog that formerly had

liked his trainer now disliked him, for example. This result reminds one of

modern cognition reversals in which a person’s love of his parents suddenly

becomes hate, as new love has been shifted suddenly to a cult. The

unanticipated, extreme changes in Pavlov’s dogs would have driven any good

experimental scientist into a near-frenzy of curiosity. That was indeed Pavlov’s

reaction. But not many scientists would have done what Pavlov next did.

 

And that was to spend the rest of his long life giving stress-induced nervous

breakdowns to dogs, after which he would try to reverse the break- downs, all

the while keeping careful experimental records. He found (1) that he could

classify dogs so as to predict how easily a particular dog would breakdown; (2)

that the dogs hardest to break down were also the hardest to return to their

pre- breakdown state; (3) that any dog could be broken down; and (4) that he

couldn’t reverse a breakdown except by reimposing stress.

 

Now, practically everyone is revolted by such experimental treatment of man’s

friend, the dog. Moreover, Pavlov was Russian and did his last work under the

Communists. And maybe those facts account for the present extreme, widespread

ignorance of Pavlov’s last work. The two Freudian psychiatrists with whom I