Experimental Psychology and Abnormal Behaviour

What is behavioural psychotherapy? In the following note I do not intend to give a comprehensive answer to this question but rather to put forward a point of view and to illustrate it using one particular example. It appears that the term ‘behavioural psychotherapy’ has acquired a rather restricted meaning in the relatively short time it has been around. In many senses the term Behavioural has become synonymous with scientific i.e. the sort of knowledge gained by the application of experimental techniques to a problem. This I believe is all well and good. The restrictive aspect comes when we consider what sort of problems have been tackled in the ‘behavioural way’. On the whole it seems that we have concentrated on treatment aspects of psychotherapy and appear to have made substantial inroads into problems of therapy. We have now available a plethora of techniques e.g. systematic desensitisation, flooding, modeling, token economies, which had been demon-stated to be efficient in the past. In addition to this there has been a concerted effort to develop a method which enables a degree of experimental rigour to be introduced into the treatment of the individual case (see Mathews, 1975; Leitenberg, 1973).