Inside the Skinner Box

A glimpse behind the scenes of the story; MKULTRA & multiple personality induction

If you were under the impression my story was far-fetched, think again…

…in working with individual subjects, special attention will be given to dissociative states which tend to accompany ESP experiences. Such states can be induced and controlled to some extent with hypnosis and drugs… The data used in the study will be obtained from special groups such as psychotics, children and mediums… Learning studies will be instituted in which the subject will be rewarded or punished for his overall performance and reinforced in various ways by being told he was right, or being told what the target was, with electric shock etc… In other cases psychological tricks will be used to modify his attitudes. The experimenters will be particularly interested in dissociative states, from the abaissement de niveau mental, to multiple personality in so-called mediums; and an attempt will be made to induce a number of states of this kind, using hypnosis.

Subproject 136 of MKULTRA CIA MORI ID#17395, ESP Research 1961 and 1962, declassified documents from CIA, emphasis added

If some of this reminds you of that amusing little scene at the beginning of Ghostbusters, in which Venkman inflicts electric shocks on the guy in the guise of studying ‘negative reinforcement on ESP ability’, then you’re on the right lines. Of course this scene is also a piss-take of Milgram’s (fake) electric shock experiments, but in view of Subproject 136, there is clearly a far more sinister undertone at work here…

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Given that what I intended as a short outro to the story turned into two thousand words, I thought better of it, as it might annoy some people and spoil the whole thing, so I have decided to essentially copy and paste it into a new, accompanying post. Which is this one.

So this is a sort of behind the scenes explanatory thing for the story Skinner Box, which you can read at that link there. You should probably read the story first before this, although it might be intriguing to read this first. Chances are, though, you may have already read it.

Just to sort of repeat what I hinted at in the intro to it, the story ended up being a kind of backstory/flashback within the What to do about Katrina serialisation. This link will take you to the Intermission, which will give you the story so far (along with all the appropriate links to the beginning). I’ve repeated that link at the end of this.

In particular, the latest instalment, Scene 41, in which you first meet Katyusha, will make a lot more sense. Likewise, so will Fragment 49, in which Katrina and Malcolm discuss MPD.

Part of me was thinking maybe this is far too spoilery. I had intended to keep the mystery going for a lot longer before answering some of these key questions, but I couldn’t really resist it. Besides, I will also say that it is not a definitive answer. There is, in other words, a lot more to it than all this. You will not know what’s really going on for quite some time.

Likewise, it doesn’t, as it happens, preclude the idea that Katrina is from a parallel world. So far be it from me to disappoint you there.

Also, what follows is only a brief intro to all these ideas. So I am still remaining a little suggestive. And as I say shortly, I am hoping to do a much longer-form essay on it.

So then, here is some background to the Skinner Box.

That’s Skinner’s Crib, by the way. Yes, it is a real thing. He built it for his daughter…

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This story, then, is based on research into genuine horrors perpetrated by the likes of the CIA in their infamous MKULTRA series of experimentation. I have been intending to do a longer form article on all this stuff for my Classified-K section at some point, but for now, instead of doing a separate post (which fewer people would read) this is just a very brief outline for the purposes of the behind-the-story thing. Hopefully you’ll find it interesting.

It would indeed be nice to think it never happened, or could not ever happen, but the tragedy is that it did happen. This includes something you may have heard of, namely the search for the Manchurian candidate. That link will take you to John Marks’ book of that name, which you can read there for free. Personally I think Marks lets these monsters off lightly, with his suggestion that they were only doing it because it was the Cold War and they were actually true patriots and all that. I rather think they were just a bunch of psychopaths who did what they did because they could.

Those of you familiar with ‘behavioural’ psychology will certainly be aware of what the Skinner Box is, namely an ‘operant conditioning chamber’. It was invented by a man called B.F. Skinner (the famous behavioural psychologist), and was a development of Thorndike’s original ‘puzzle box’, which is essentially a sort of maze. Officially, they are only supposed to put small animals in there like rats and pigeons and suchlike. Obviously, to put a human in there, let alone a child, without something called ‘informed consent’ is a serious criminal offence, to put it mildly. But informed consent isn’t in the CIA’s dictionary.

The ‘operant’ conditioning comes from ‘learning’. That’s to say to escape from the maze the animal has to operate a lever. Each subsequent time they are in the puzzle box it will take them less and less time to get out. The Skinner Box takes this further and incorporates ‘punishment’ and ‘reward’. So the lever will either turn off the electrified floor or give the creature a reward, for example.

Here is the Wikipedia entry about the Skinner Box. Naturally, being Wikipedia, it studiously avoids any suggestion of using such a thing on humans.

Skinner himself, however, did build a sort of ‘crib’ for his own child, Deborah, the famous ‘baby in a box’, who sadly ended up taking her own life when she was older. That’s the photo up top, of course.

The name ‘Ivan Kamerensky’ in the story is a play on the name Ewen Cameron, who was another notorious psychopath employed by the CIA, masquerading as a caring psychologist. If you’ve heard of ‘psychic driving’, then that was Cameron, amongst others, for the notorious MKULTRA Subproject 68 (of 149 known - they allegedly destroyed most of the documents in the 1970s - yeah right), also known as the Montreal Experiments.

And yes, he did involve children in these ‘experiments’.

Ironically, Cameron was at the Nuremberg Doctors’ trials. Clearly, far from being horrified by anything he may have heard there, he appears to have been rather inspired by it.

Another bad guy is Louis Jolyon West, and even the Wikipedia entry for him is incriminating. It does, for example, mention that he was involved in the creation of cults and likewise the infamous ‘False Memory Syndrome Foundation’, which was not only founded by abusers (from the Freud family no less), many of whom had links with MKULTRA, but was specifically founded with the purpose of discrediting abuse victims. This is why so many people still believe the ‘Satanic Panic’ was just hysteria. No, it wasn’t.

Another name for the list is Loretta Bender (of the Bender-Gestalt test), who did indeed subject children to electric shocks, LSD-25, and other horrors.

The ‘25’ in LSD-25 by the way, if you weren’t already aware, is simply the 25th version of Lysergic Acid which Hofmann synthesised back in 1943. This is the version most people know as just acid.

For these images, by the way, I just told the Great Image Generator to do something like ‘small female child with dark hair in an operant conditioning chamber lit only by dim red glow’ or similar. Some of them turned out so well I simply had to include them.

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Anyhow, for true mind control programming, however, you really do need to start young. The younger the better, and no older than nine years old. The reason is because in terms of human brain development, what we call ‘identity’ becomes fully formed by the age of 7-9. Consequently, it is not possible to create a multiple personality beyond that age of 9.

MPD (also known as dissociative identity disorder, or DID) is always a result of sustained childhood trauma (nearly always serious abuse, including of the Satanic ritual variety). Once the evil psychologist understands this, then what they would do is induce a multiple by subjecting the child to trauma, which creates ‘splits’, often separated by ‘amnesia walls’. To protect one part from having to experience the trauma themselves - the brain can’t cope, so it sort of shuts off (dissociates), producing a new copy, so to speak. These copies can then be ‘programmed’ or ‘conditioned’.

The cryptonym for all this is known as MONARCH - which is named after the butterfly. Hence the references in the story.

The reason this works is because this condition is absolutely not a ‘disorder’. Each ‘part’ or ‘alter’ of the multiple fulfils a very important role or function in preserving the order and stability of the ‘System’. Thus you have ‘gatekeeper’ alters, and ‘trauma-holding’ alters, for example. You can read all about alters at this link.

So in other words, the ‘mind control programmer’ works with these specifically functional parts. They would keep this up whilst ‘identity’ is developing in line with the overall brain development, such that by that age 7-9 each part is a unique, fully-fledged identity in itself.

The amnesia walls, of course, can effectively create ‘spies’, which may remain completely unknown to the other parts. Thus you can have an outwardly normal person (known as the ‘apparently normal part’ or ‘front alter’), who is entirely unaware even that they have multiple personality, let alone that they are a ‘Manchurian Candidate’. This is where the ‘gatekeeper’ comes in, because that part decides which alter has access to which information/memory (in the story, this is Tempe).

Yes, it is very scary stuff. One of the scary bits I inserted into this story is the estimate of ‘numbers’ of programmed multiples. There are millions of people diagnosed with MPD in the world, for a start. It is very reasonable for a small team of eight programmers to produce twenty a year. Now multiply that by a thousand or more, then multiply by however many decades this has been going on.

Given that we know, for a historical fact, that the CIA was doing this kind of thing (right back to the 1950s), I don’t believe this should be dismissed as ‘conspiracy theory’. Yes, it may be so psychologically intolerable for normal people - that is to say, decent people - to even comprehend, such that they - ironically - dissociate and choose not to believe, but given how dystopian the world really is, and how demonstrably monstrous the people in social power really are, I think we should not be so hasty to dismiss it.

There is also a credible conspiracy theory suggesting that the perpetrators of many of these high-school mass shootings, as well as many of those serial killers, are in fact victims of MKULTRA experiments. An abusive childhood is often a shared aspect of their profile, after all; along with links with the military-intelligence complex. The book to read about that is Dave McGowan’s Programmed to Kill.

Two other books to read about all this are Bluebird - Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists by Colin A. Ross (he also happens to be a specialist in MPD/DID), and A Nation Betrayed - Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on our Children and other Innocent People by Carol Rutz (she is a victim-survivor of MKULTRA).

Likewise, it would not be surprising in the slightest if those ‘fear porn’ movies were based in reality. The reason for turning them into movies being precisely to encourage people to think ‘it’s only a story’.

The real world is scary enough. And if we do want to make the world a better place - which it absolutely could be - then we need to acknowledge the existence of real evil, and then expose it and destroy it.

I would also add that this is the reason why you never see this sort of stuff in the movies. Yes, they don’t allow it, but this is not because they care about children - it’s actually the opposite - they know people see the world through stories, and how much people are influenced by what’s on their screens. This is why, for example, Hollywood has never shown you what a nuclear weapon really does, because so many millions of people would forcibly demand an end to them. Likewise, if the general public were shown just one snuff movie then there would be an ultimate revolution. Because the people would no longer be able to deny the existence of real evil amongst them. They would have a natural, visceral self-defensive reaction. And evil would be defeated.

Evil, remember, needs to hide. Because Good has superiority in numbers.

Should this be the real purpose of horror writing? Not to distract, but to enlighten? I’ll leave that one hanging there.

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Anyway, that’s probably enough of that to be terrorising you with for now.

The other inspiration for this story was, you will be intrigued/amused to hear, based on a genuine experience I had as a child. No, not of being subjected to a Skinner Box (at least, not as far as I remember), but I’m talking about the bit where Katyusha is crawling through the tunnels. When I was young at one point we lived in this Edwardian house which had a cellar, which had a little wooden trapdoor leading into these little, perhaps two foot square dusty tunnels which mazed beneath the entire house. Foolish and curious child as I was, I did indeed get a torch and climb in (unless I was prompted into it by my coercively controlling mother, I don’t know). At one point in this labyrinth, I did come to a crossroads and there, to my left, it opened out into a slightly larger chamber and - I kid you not - the walls were crawling with clusters of black spiders. Big black furry fucking spiders.

Needless to say, I was not able to turn around. So I had to sort of edge myself backwards to get the fuck out of there.

The rest of this memory, mercifully, no longer exists. In fact I can hardly even remember any of it. It’s a memory of something which I know did happen, but I simply can’t access it. Obviously that’s classic dissociation there. It’s like it’s something that happened to ‘somebody else’.

So that’s where that bit of the story comes from. I do actually have a Lovecraftian pastiche version of that memory that I wrote some thirty-odd years or so ago, which I might drag up from my mental catacombs at some point.

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Anyway, that is it for my behind-the-story outro thing. I hope I didn’t upset you too much. I do admit it’s a pretty fucking scary story, especially as it involves a child, and people are naturally sensitive about that. But I also think some of our best horror writers are those who have indeed genuinely experienced the dark side. Perhaps I should consider writing more horror stuff.

If you liked this - sorry, ‘liked’ or ‘enjoyed’ is probably the wrong word - ‘appreciated’ (that’s better) this story and/or this glimpse behind the scenes, then please drop me a like, share, comment and so on - each of which makes me very happy and grateful.

If this has made you intrigued about my Katrina serialisation, you can catch up with the story so far at the Intermission post, at that link.

I also did another scary story, also based on some of my own dark childhood memories, called Child Game Hunts, which you can read there.

If you’d like to subscribe, here is a lovely button just for you!

And another lovely thing is that people now have the delightful option of feeding my caffeine addiction and buying me a coffee, which you can do there.

Anyway, I am very grateful to you for reading this far, and totally grateful indeed for Garen & the TiF Team for organising this little scarefest. I would not have written this story otherwise.

Well, now I get to read all the other scary stuff. And you can too – at this link here.

Once I’ve had a stiff drink, naturally. Or a drink with a stiff, even.

TTFN, as the good doctor Lecter said…