Old Londoners like to use "clockwork orange" as a metaphor for something weird beyond comparison. In "A Clockwork Orange", both the protagonist Alex in the story and the plot itself are as strange as "A Clockwork Orange."
Alex is a young man who is used to squandering freedom at will. He enjoys the joy of life as he pleases, acts as the leader of the gangsters, he vents his violence on anyone and satisfies sexual needs. In the end, he was betrayed by his accomplices during a crime and went to jail.
In prison, in order to shorten the sentence, Alex voluntarily accepted the "crime reforming therapy" experiment. After a period of transformation, Alex became a person insulated from violence, sexuality, and all condemned behaviors in the moral realm. As long as he moved these "crooked thoughts", the fierce resistance reaction in his body was like Monkey King's tight-fitting curse that he could not move. After a series of tests, the prison authorities and scientists were very satisfied with the results of the experiment, agreed to let Alex out of prison, and planned to extend this method to other prisoners to solve the problem of prison space shortage.
Alex returned to society with reshaped value judgments, but he didn't end well. Those who had been hurt by him in the past retaliated wildly against him, and he no longer had the ability to protect himself with violence; his family had become accustomed to a normal life without him, had no intention of accepting him, and he was unable to express his anger, and in the end even After being put under house arrest by the novelist he had hurt, he was forced to jump from the window upstairs to escape. The government's opposition party made a big fuss about this "crime reforming therapy", which made the government embarrassed, and finally had to lift the original setting for Alex, so that he could commit crimes as he pleased. At the end of the film, Alex said "I was cured all right" (I was cured all right), the deep meaning of which makes people think.
I was very impressed by the "crime reformation therapy" in this film. Scientists let Alex watch an excessive amount of "immoral" movies every day, including naked violence and blood, rape and a large number of war casualties and fascist shots, and at the same time inject him with an injection that produces extreme physical aversion. Produce Pavlovian conditioned reflex. In principle, this is very similar to the aversion therapy (that is, through the combination with some unpleasant stimulus to eliminate the behavior to be quit) in the behavior therapy that was later developed based on the theory of the Pavlovian experiment. In the behavioral therapy of psychology, some anti-social behaviors (such as homicide, drug use, theft), alcoholism, and smoking are considered to be the conscious learning results of the higher neural processes of the brain. The treatment or correction of such behaviors is Aversion therapy similar to painful punishment therapy is mainly used.
From the results, the psychologist’s experiment is basically successful: Alex can no longer commit his atrocities, as long as he has the idea of engaging in violence, Alex’s violent physiological reaction makes him retreat to the evil itself. Three feet. But the value judgment model set by psychologists is like an omnipresent shackle, in that Alex no longer has the freedom to choose himself. He has become a "clockworker": after the clockwork is wound, he must go on endlessly according to the set pattern in an orderly and precise manner.
Such behavioral therapy has obvious flaws. It focuses on behavior. It does not talk about personality, self, motivation and other internal variables that cannot be directly observed. Instead, it focuses on behaviors that can be observed and measured in a certain way. . All psychological barriers must be described as "unsuitable behaviors", and it is not assumed that there are more fundamental and deeper reasons behind these behaviors. This determines the easy repeatability of behavior therapy. After Alex was released from prison, he did not undergo a fundamental change in his fundamental personal moral judgment: he wanted to fight back with violence, but his physical shackles made him give up this behavior.
On this issue, a new theory emerged in behavior therapy after the 1970s, namely "cognitive behavior therapy" based on cognitive psychology. "Cognitive behavior therapy" not only pays attention to the behavior itself, but also pays attention to the role of internal cognitive processes in causing obstacles and behavior changes. It developed the original behavioral therapy theory and became a relatively complete therapy system, far exceeding the scientific nature and actual therapeutic effects of psychoanalytic therapy. Of course, this is something later.
In the movie "A Clockwork Orange", the success of behavior therapy is not the essence of the film. Instead, it forces people to ask: If psychology can be developed to such a degree, what is the subjectivity of free will that a person has as a complete individual? When a person is deprived of the ability of moral choice by science, what kind of existence will he become? When a person can be mechanically established a kind of animal conditioning, what is the difference between him and laboratory animals?
This inevitably involves the ethical principles of psychological research: "When scientificity and ethics are contradictory, we should first ensure its ethics, and give up research or adopt other methods that do not violate ethics." The moral ethics here refers to What is it? Means that "freedom of moral choice" is the last piece of human life in modern society that should be maintained spiritually? With the rapid development of modern science, objective truths have gradually penetrated into the spiritual realm of human beings, which makes people always worry that "noble people" will eventually become a "clockwork orange" copied and cloned from each other, and "noble and lonely souls" "Thinking" is reduced to the implementation of a uniform moral model. Where is this scale?
We cannot answer this question yet. But we can feel our tendency through "A Clockwork Orange", which is to refuse to be experimental products for government and scientific institutions. "A Clockwork Orange" can be explored in psychology, such as Alex’s amazing fascination with Beethoven’s classical music (he believes that the sacred and indestructible nature of music is accompanied by Beethoven’s music when rape is carried out. ), the influence of "consumer capitalism" (a large number of "symbols" produced by television and audio) in "post-modern society" on people and so on. There are not many introductions to the film and the original work in China. This does not affect the "A Clockwork Orange" as a surrealist superb work. It has always attracted people's attention and thinking. A Clockwork Orange" (original author Anthony Burgess).
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