Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [380]
The induction of neurosis in animals was standard Pavlovian psychology—Pavlov himself had done something like it, and so had other experimenters in the United States—but Liddell was going further by studying deconditioning to cure the neurosis. (“Rest cures”—time spent away from the laboratory—were ineffective; the animal would improve, but on re-entering the laboratory would immediately relapse.) Liddell pursued his work and published his findings for over two decades without suggesting to any clinical therapist that the method might be applicable to human beings. When I queried him in 1952, he was reluctant to speculate but admitted that he hoped it would prove to be useful.*
It did so far sooner than he expected it to. In Johannesburg, South Africa, a general practitioner named Joseph Wolpe read the Pavlovian literature while studying psychiatry at the University of Witwatersrand in 1947 and 1948, and was greatly impressed. He conducted experiments of his own similar to Liddell’s but using cats, which he made neurotic by shocking them while feeding them in a cage in the experiment room; after a while they would not eat in the cage even when half-starved. Wolpe then sought to reverse the conditioning by offering them food pellets in a room that looked quite different. Their anxiety was low there because of the surroundings, and they soon learned to eat in a cage in that room. Wolpe then fed them in a cage in a room somewhat like the experiment room, then in a third still more like it, and finally in the experiment room itself.46
He called this method “reciprocal inhibition” or “desensitization”; his theory was that if a pleasurable response (such as feeding) that inhibits anxiety occurs in the presence of anxiety-producing stimuli, it will weaken the power of those stimuli.47 In the case of his cats, the pleasurable response to food became associated with the cage and eventually with the cage in the experiment room, overcoming the anxiety that had been created there.
Wolpe began seeking a comparable technique that might be used with his human patients. (The feeding response would rarely be strong enough in humans, and in any case would not be practical in office visits.) Retraining human beings by desensitization seemed to him an obviously more scientific way to treat neurosis than by dynamic psychotherapy. It may also have appealed to Wolpe, a small, chilly, authoritarian man, for other reasons. Many years later, a study of the personalities of therapists would find that behavior therapists—those whose methods are based on behaviorist principles—tend to be unemotional and to prefer objectivity and distance, while dynamic therapists tend to be emotional and to prefer subjectivity and interpersonal involvement.48 Wolpe’s dislike of and contempt for psychodynamic psychotherapy was absolute; as he later wrote, “There is no scientific evidence for the Freudian conception of neurosis … A neurosis is just a habit—a persistent habit of unadaptive behavior, acquired by learning.”49
After some years of experimenting and reading, Wolpe found a method he thought would work; it became the basis of most of his practice from then on. He would induce a pleasant trancelike state in the patient, link its agreeable feelings by associative training with the fear-inducing stimulus, and thereby overcome the fear. (This pertains only to a neurotic fear; the procedure would be useless against fear aroused by a real and continuing danger, like living in a city under enemy bombardment.)
Wolpe would begin such treatment by spending a few hours taking a new patient’s history and indoctrinating him or her with the theory that