A comparison of positive and negative (aversive) conditioning in the treatment of homosexuality

A Brief History of Behavioral and Cognitive Behavioral Approaches to Sexual Offender Treatment: Part 2. The Modern Era

“…Marquis (1970) had described a procedure he called orgasmic reconditioning that involved having the client masturbate to orgasm while watching or fantasizing normative sexual behavior with adult partners. Variations on this theme had previously been described by Davison (1968) and by Thorpe, Schmidt, and Castell (1964), and other clinicians modified these techniques (Abel, Blanchard, Barlow, & Flanagan, 1975;Maletzky, 1985;VanDeventer & Laws, 1978). The evidence advanced in support of all these variants on masturbatory reconditioning is, however, weak (Laws & Marshall, 1991 ).…”

Elimination of a sadistic fantasy by a client-controlled counterconditioning technique: A case study.

“…Thus, for example, Freund (1960) gave his male homosexuals not only aversion conditioning trials to pictures of men, but also exposures to pictures of nude women after injection of male hormones. Similar procedures have been employed by Thorpe, Schmidt, and Castell (1963) and Feldman and MacCulloch (1965).…”

Clinical interventions by psychologists with lesbians and gay men

“…However, it was not until the 1960s that this mode of therapy began to gain in popularity. In this paradigm, aversion techniques, such as shock and emetic solutions, were used to attempt to change sexual orientation (e.g., Freund, 1960; Thorpe, Schmidt, & Castell, 1963). However, these methods proved to be little more effective than psychoanalysis (Bancroft, 1974).…”