Word: reflexive
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...fable, dragged itself off to some distant jungle graveyard and died. Psychoanalysis has outlived its usefulness. Its methods are vague, its treatment is long drawn out, and more often than not, its results are insipid and unimpressive." With this blast against his rivals and competitors, Salter opens his Conditioned Reflex Therapy (Creative Age; $3.75), published last week. The book is more than a sneer at psychoanalysis and its father, Sigmund Freud; it is also a loose-jointed exposition of the wonders of Author Salter's own specialty, behavioristic psychology. Freud's followers, says Salter, waste their patients...
Never Mind Your Manners. Almost as extreme as his bitterness against the Freudians is Salter's veneration of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the physiologist who coined the term "conditioned reflex." (Pavlov's classic example: a dog which has heard a bell ring whenever it was fed will eventually drool whenever it hears the bell, even though no food is offered.) The behaviorist school is founded on what Salter calls "the firm scientific bedrock of Pavlov." Its main tenet: man is a creature of habit; he can be "conditioned" to the habit of not even hearing a pistol fired next...
Dearer Ovaltine. The British move touched off convulsive reflex actions around the fiscal world. (To cushion the shock, British banks and exchanges were closed for one day; other countries declared similar holidays.) All the dominions devalued their currencies in proportion; Canada, a dollar country, devalued its dollar 10%. In the colonies the readjustment was automatic. Ireland, Egypt and Israel brought their pounds into parity with Britain's. Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, The Netherlands and Sweden made devaluation moves...
...general cry denouncing Tito. In his turn, Tito last week denounced Kostov as a capitalist agent. The various men who are becoming known as Titoists are not connected by political machinery or common purpose-although they may be some day. Titoism is not an ideology. It is a human reflex against Stalin's policy of putting Soviet Russia, the "Motherland of the Revolution," ahead of all other Communist states...
...help of a number of geometric diagrams and a lot of peeking into the plumbing of "the sympathico-adrenal system," that laughter is a form of self-assertion. This section of the book also notes some pedagogical experiments in what Koestler gravely calls "the functioning of the original squirm reflex"-a phenomenon further documented in his book by laboratory experiments in what happens when scientists tickle babies...