Multimodal Therapy

As a graduate student in the 1950s, Arnold Lazarus broke away from his training in traditional psychotherapy. Despite favoring the nascent behavioral movement, Lazarus soon realized that the narrow-focused behavior therapy was too limited and began developing cognitive-behavioral therapy, broad-spectrum behavior therapy, and ultimately multimodal therapy (MMT). Lazarus based MMT on his realization that seven transactional dimensions need to be addressed for therapy to be optimally effective. Called the BASIC I.D., these dimensions represent behavior, affect, sensation, imagery, cognition, interpersonal relationships, and drugs/biological processes. Today, MMT is a comprehensive, biopsychosocial model of human functioning as well as a paradigm of human personality that is used around the world when working with a wide variety of clients.