My experience with Pavlovian conditioning occurred when my father threw me into the Pacific Ocean as a means of teaching me to swim. Instead of learning to swim. I almost drowned. From that point I have been terrified of the ocean. Before my near-death experience, I had seen the ocean as a beautiful example of nature, but after that point I have wanted nothing to do with the ocean and cannot even see it from a distance without experiencing panic attacks.
What occurred, according to Pavlovian principles, is that the stimulus of the mere sight of the ocean triggers in me the response of fear of drowning, of losing all power over my body in a medium which overwhelms me with the threat of death. Pavlov found in his experiments that "environmental events that had previously had no relation to a given reflex could come, through experience, to trigger the reflex" (57). The "conditioned stimulus" in this case is the simple sight of the ocean and the "conditioned response" (57). is terror of drowning.
Although in the actual experiments Pavlov carried out with dogs, "conditioned responses do not typically start occurring at full strength all of a sudden" (59), in the specific case of my near-drowning, the conditioned response was established immediately and at full strength because of the intensity of the experience.
I now experience a "conditioned fear" or a "conditioned emotional response" (60) at the sight of the ocean. I have been denied the pleasure of looking at the ocean, the pleasure of swimming in the ocean, the pleasure of even thinking about the ocean, because of the Pavlovian conditioning which was established when my father threw me in the ocean and I almost drowned. I did not experience something which would prevent my survival---unless I were to be washed overboard and needed to swim. I have refused to be taught to swim after that point, so technically my experience could be seen as an event which some day could caus...