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The term “Behaviour Therapy” is used to characterize a group of methods of treatment all of which have their theoretical basis in modern learning theory—the papers in the present volume set out to illustrate that behaviour therapy is a superior alternative to any form of psychotherapy.
In the opening paper Professor Eysenck states that neurotic symptoms are learned patterns of behaviour which are unadaptive and that individuals vary in the speed and firmness with which conditioned responses are built up—those in whom they are built up especially quickly and strongly are more likely to develop phobias and other anxiety and fear reactions than those who are deficient in this capacity and more likely to show the neurotic symptomatology of the psychopath and the hysteric. The normal introvert tends to belong to the group showing surplus conditioned reactions, and the normal extrovert to that showing deficient conditioned reactions. Treatment aims at extinction of surplus conditioned responses and, in the case of deficient conditioned responses, at building up the missing stimulus-response connections.
The remaining thirty-four papers by numerous contributors are divided into groups illustrating the four main methods of behaviour therapy. The first group illustrates therapy by reciprocal inhibition—an example being the removal of a child's phobia by introducing the fear-object after a hungry child has started to eat and gradually bringing it near to the table until the child can touch it. In the cases of phobia in adults, described by V. Meyer, the pleasant stimulus is provided by the presence of the experimenter in the fear situation, for example, walking in the street or riding on a 'bus.
The second group deals with therapy by negative practice and conditioned inhibition. Dunlap has shown experimentally, using typing errors, that repetition of the wrong responses led to the elimination of mistakes more successfully than repetition of the correct response, provided that th