Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [379]
In recent years, partly due to the tight-purse policies of managed care administrators, short-term psychotherapy has established a firm place in the therapy world. A number of studies have dealt with doubts about its effectiveness; in 2001 a careful review of such studies by Bernard L. Bloom, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, found “brief psychotherapy consistently helpful, particularly for mild to moderate levels of depression… The frequent severity and chronicity of these conditions suggests, however, that several brief episodes of care may be necessary to achieve optimal effect.”42
In 1990, about a third of all psychotherapists in the APA were basically psychodynamic in orientation,43 but ever since the 1960s a number of other therapeutic approaches, very different from the psychodynamic, have been attracting sizable followings. Some of these methods seemed, when new, to be the ultimate challenge to dynamic therapy, but none has ousted it; all methods, the old and the new, continue to be practiced. Some therapists use only or mainly one; many others classify themselves as eclectic and use any of several different methods of treatment, according to need. In recent years there has been an interest in “psychotherapy integration”—the harmonizing of the several major theories of psychotherapy and the use of any and all of the major methods, depending on the nature of the problem and the needs of the patient.44
Let us look at these newer therapies and try to find out why, despite their profound differences, they are all, most improbably, credited with similar rates of success.
The Patient as Laboratory Animal: Behavior Therapy
In 1951 Howard Liddell, a benign, gentle, gray-haired professor of psychobiology at Cornell, was doing research that any outsider would have considered sadistic. He was systematically creating neuroses—or symptoms analogous to those of neurotic human beings—in sheep, goats, and a large pig named Tiny. On a farm outside Ithaca, Liddell or one of his several helpers would attach a wire to one leg of a sheep in a small chamber; then he would flash a light in the chamber, and ten seconds later give the sheep a jolt of current.
At first the sheep would merely jump, but after scores of shocks it learned the meaning of the signal, and when the light flashed, it would race about the chamber as if to avoid the shock—to no avail. After about a thousand such cycles, as soon as the sheep was led into the test chamber it would begin twitching and jerking, and at the first signal would grind its teeth, pant, roll its eyes, and become rigid, staring at the floor. At this stage, even when it was turned out to pasture, it behaved abnormally; it stayed as far from its fellows as possible. It had developed the animal equivalent of a full-blown stress neurosis.45
Liddell also sought to reverse the process. A badly traumatized sheep would be wired up in the test chamber and would see the light flash but not experience any subsequent shock. Since a sheep is not a particularly intelligent animal, a great many innocuous flashings were necessary before it began unlearning its fear responses to the signal; eventually it would be thoroughly deconditioned.
Pigs, in contrast, are smart. Tiny had become phobic about her laboratory feed box after getting shocked a few times when she lifted the lid, so she would not go near it even when she saw food being put into it. To dispel her phobia, a graduate student fed her outside the pen, where she felt safe, until she came to trust him; then he took her into the laboratory, put a juicy piece of apple in her feed box, and talked to her soothingly while scratching