Behavior Therapy and the Good Life

Abstract

In his 1979 presidential address to the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Barlow (1979) reviewed predictions made 10 years earlier by several prominent psychologists that behavior therapy would “run its course and wither away by the end of the decade.” Clearly, that did not happen. Indeed, during the past decade the domain of behavior therapy has undergone a diversification and expansion, the rapidity of which is unprecedented in the field of social-influence therapies. Commentators on the advancement of behavior therapy have observed the confusion such growth in direction and size can generate within the field, even with respect to a basic definition of what constitutes behavior and behavior therapy (e.g., Kazdin, 1979). By the middle 1970s, phenomena occuring inside the brain and conceptualized as cognitions were legitimized as cognitive behavior and considered amenable to cognitive behavior therapeutic influence (e.g., Mahoney, 1974), though such conceptual models were eschewed by most early behavior modifiers. Not only have the set of phenomena considered legitimate objects of behavioral scientific enquiry expanded, but we are no longer so sure of the basic principles by which current behavioral procedures work. Kazdin (1979) has noted the lack of correspondence between even the simplest and most basic behavior modification procedures and their alleged experimentally derived theoretical underpinnings. Yet, it has been just this implicit recognition that empirical, clinical pragmatics precede theoretical consistency, if not uniformity, that has allowed, indeed encouraged the growth and diversification of behavior therapy, foiling predictions of its demise through self-inflicted sterility.

It is the nature of all animals from the moment of birth to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. -EPICURUS