Aversion Therapy

Aversion therapy is a form of behavior modification that employs unpleasant and sometimes painful stimuli in an effort to help a patient unlearn socially unacceptable or harmful behavior. The first recorded use of aversion therapy was in 1930 for the treatment of alcoholism, but by the 1950s and 1960s it had become one of the more popular methods used to "cure" sexual deviation, including homosexuality and sex offending.

Of the handful of methods psychoanalysts employed to treat sex offending, aversion therapy was arguably the most inhumane. Treatment involved presenting offenders with images of conventionally attractive targets geared toward there preferences. Sometimes patients were asked to provide these images themselves, and were encouraged to submit photographs of their idea of attractive. Aversion therapy involved projecting the image of the inappropriate sexual object onto a screen, and administering a noxious stimulus at the same time. It was believed that by replacing sexual arousal with noxious stimuli, the patient would rid himself of their sexual deviation and develop "normal" desires.

Initially, aversion