Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition
Systematic desensitisation. The first behavioural therapy with an outcome record.
Any persistent habit of unadaptive behaviour acquired by learning in a physiologically normal organism.
Joseph Wolpe sets out a treatment method drawn from learning theory: a response that opposes anxiety, brought into the presence of a feared stimulus, weakens the tie between them. From this principle the book builds systematic desensitisation, which pairs deep muscle relaxation with a graded hierarchy of anxiety-evoking scenes, and assertive training for fear that surfaces in relationships.
Stanford University Press published the work in 1958. Wolpe grounded it in animal experiments and his own case series, and reported recovery figures at a time when few therapies claimed any. The book's contention that neurotic patterns are acquired, and can therefore be undone, met resistance from clinicians who expected the symptom simply to return elsewhere.
For a psychodynamic reader, the interest lies in the argument it set going: that a symptom can be addressed directly, counted, and followed to an outcome. Much of present-day exposure work traces back to these chapters.
About the author
Joseph Wolpe
Joseph Wolpe (1915 to 1997) was a South African-born psychiatrist who spent much of his career in the United States. Working from the principle of reciprocal inhibition, that anxiety cannot easily coexist with a competing relaxed response, he developed systematic desensitisation and helped establish behaviour therapy as a distinct clinical field. His 1958 book, Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition, set out this method. For psychodynamic clinicians, his work marks an early, explicit alternative to interpretive approaches to anxiety.
Details
- 1958
- English
- Stanford University Press
- Stanford University Press, 1958
- 239
- 9780804705097