Snake Phobia

Paper Summary:

This paper takes one case of a woman suffering from a snake phobia and adapts it to show how three great psychotherapists in history would have treated the problem based on their own theories. The therapists discussed are Sigmund Freud (1856-1949), Ivan Pavlov (1849-1946), and Carl Jung (1875-1961).

From the Paper:

"The Russian Ivan Pavlov, were he to meet the female patient afraid of snakes, however, would be much more apt to focus on alleviating her immediate anxieties through conditioning, rather than probing into her past. As a therapist and a scientist of the human mind, Pavlov focused on the ability to alter the immediate displays of human behavior, and the importance of operant conditioning in human behavior. Pavlov acknowledged the biological impulses to human responses in the form of an innate reflex, an instinctive and unlearned reaction to a stimulus. However, a conditioned reflex is learned, either through negative or positive stimuli. The fear of snakes is a learned reflex, as young children who would play with snakes and other reptiles with innocent fascination are soon taught to fear by example or stimuli i.e., a mother screams and pulls her child away from a harmless garter snake, perhaps reinforcing the gesture with a statement of horror. (Pavlov, 2003)"

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• Research Paper # 94759 : "Conditioning and Phobia Treatment"
• Essay # 86871 : "Social Phobia"

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