On Behavior Therapy: A Critique*

It is as therapy that psychoanalysis began and as such it has developed and thrived; however, our professional commitment to psychoanalysis as treatment and science does not close us off from an interest in other therapies that purport to resolve psychopathology. We want to know what different therapies do, how they do what they say they do and what can be learned that can be useful, so that we may incorporate new and valuable contributions into our discipline.

For me, psychoanalysis is defined more by its goals than its tactics and techniques. A method which has as its goal the resolution of psychopathology through a cognitive process of delineating and extinguishing irrational belief systems, is psychoanalysis. Styles and techniques are adaptable and lend themselves to meeting the needs of various patients in different ways and I consider a therapist whose methods and formulations are identical for each patient to be an assembly-line thinker, limited and inflexible. It is in this spirit that I turned my attention to a serious appraisal of behavior therapy.

Behavior therapy is basically rooted in stimulus-response theory. Laboratory psychologists for many decades now have been attempting to free S-R theory from an exclusive preoccupation with muscular contractions and physical energies and to stretch the theory to accommodate higher mental processes, behavioral, cultural, and societal phenomena, and especially since World War II, diagnosis, psychopathology and therapy (Berger and Lambert, 1968). S-R theory has indeed been valuable heuristically, in our own field notably to Abram Kardiner, who used it as a paradigm in investigating basic personality in the various cultures he studied (Kardiner, 1939). In brief, he viewed cultural institutions as the units of stimulae, and social behavior as the elements of response through which he delineated basic personality.

There are now many mini systems within the framework of the stimulus-response theory, as in theories of confl