You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
To a behavior therapist, what Dr. Sperling's article most strikingly reveals is how little the strict psychoanalyst gets to know about his patient as a present-day living person. This deficiency of information seems to be a natural consequence of the rules of free association. Since direct exploration of the patient's complaints is precluded or pre-empted, details about them or their relation to other events are gleaned, if at all, only indirectly or incidentally.
Dr. Sperling's discovery that somatic symptoms are frequently related to phobias and other forms of anxiety is no news at all to behavioristically-oriented therapists, who routinely probe the day-to-day reactions of their patients, relating them to each other and to their causal antecedents—a process known as “behavior analysis.” The antecedents of any reaction (normal or neurotic) consist of various combinations of external stimuli and intraorgasmic events (notably images and autonomic responses). In behavior therapy the function of the analysis is to obtain the clearest possible specification of the patterns and chains of antecedents of a neurotic reaction. These analyses have consistently shown that neurotic somatic symptoms have anxiety responses as antecedents (see, for example, Wolpe, 1958, p. 148).
What comes into focus here is the basic issue of the validity of the psychoanalytic theory of neurosis. Although this is unquestioningly accepted by Dr. Sperling, it is a fact that the theory has not to date been shown to stand up to scientific testing. It is very often impossible even to put psychoanalytic propositions to the test because of the lack of clear definition of terms, but in at least one instance a test has been carried out (Wolpe, 1961). Psychoanalytic theory holds that when neurotic symptoms have been removed, no lasting recovery can be expected as long as the putative repressed complexes remain repressed. Otherwise, it is said, there will sooner or
later be relapse or symptom substitution