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Behavior therapy is based upon theories of learning; or, if you wish, of conditioning, classical or operant. It constitutes a break with traditional insight therapy. It treats of symptoms rather than personality review and change, and does not handle the unconscious dynamics. The symptoms themselves are considered the disease.
Dr. Joseph Wolpe, a South African, now a Professor of Psychiatry at the Temple University School of Medicine, is the originator of systematic desensitization, one of the most effective of the group of treatments which constitute behavior therapy. He defines neurosis as learned behavior which is persistent and unadaptive, in which anxiety is almost always prominent and which is acquired in anxiety-generating situations.
By learned behavior is meant that which is brought about by conditioning and by reinforcement of that conditioning, whether of emotional, verbal, or motor origin. Instinctual processes are not emphasized. Behavior is “shaped” by positive and by negative or aversive responses, working on individual differences in conditionability and autonomic lability. Behavior becomes inadequate when it is ineffective, useless, incapacitating and persistent.
Historically, symptoms are considered to arise by training or by trauma, by purpose or by accident, during the life span of the individual who is more or less predisposed toward them.
Systematic desensitization, of which I shall speak in more detail, works best in the treatment of phobic disorders. In fact, it is the only treatment I know that can alter phobic responses within a short period of time.