The lately acquired knowledge of the warping
effect of the environment upon the native biological endowment of the
individual by means of the establishment of conditioned reflexes, the
discovery that any emotion which is denied its natural motor outlet
tends to seek expression through some vicarious activity, and the
realization of the fundamental importance of the unconscious factors in
shaping emotional reactions,--such formulations of behaviouristic and
analytic psychology have thrown a great deal of light upon the nature
of the individual sex life.
There are certain modifications of the erotic life which are explicable
only when we recollect that under environmental influences situations
which originally did not call up an emotional response come later to do
so. This fact, which was first noted by Setchenov, was experimentally
demonstrated by Pavlov and his students.[7] They found that when some
irrelevant stimulus, such as a musical tone or a piece of coloured paper
was presented to a dog simultaneously with its food for a sufficiently
long period, the presentation of the tone or paper alone finally caused
the same flow of saliva that the food had originally evoked. The
irrelevant stimulus was named a _food sign_, and the involuntary motor
response of salivary secretion was called a _conditioned reflex_ to
differentiate it from the similar response to the biologically adequate
stimulus of food, which was termed an _unconditioned reflex_.
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