ABSTRACT
People who live in acquisitive societies will tend to write books about how to acquire things, not how to get rid of them, and this is what academic psychologists have also done—as a matter of the routines of their discipline, of course, not of conscious ideology. That said, in order to avoid the trap of conspiracy theory, the rhetoric of learning psychology is often transparent enough to facilitate ideological deconstruction. Learning theorists are hoarders rather than wasters. Rejection and repudiation often enough leave us wondering whether unlearning has really occurred in someone. Negation is not a form of unlearning; it is simply a denial of what one knows and feels. The gentleness of Ariadne's method of unlearning may seem sometimes too cautious, too liable to result in merely piecemeal repairs of cognitive structures. The inherent danger is that the patient goes totally to pieces, consequently Cold Turkey is a route to unlearning on which one must be massively supported.
