Barlow, David H

I was born in Needham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, in 1942, in the midst of World War II, in which my father was killed in action. I attended St. Sebastian's School, a Catholic prep school, graduating in 1960, and the University of Notre Dame, graduating in 1964. At Notre Dame, I became fascinated with literary insights into the often self-defeating behavior of fictional characters. This led to a period of intense study and reading of psychoanalytic characterizations of literary figures, and, ultimately, a vague commitment to a career in psychology. Needing a specific laboratory course in experimental psychology to meet requirements for graduate school, I found a course at Boston College in the summer of 1963, taught by Joseph R. Cautela. That summer, while I was immersed in the laboratories of experimental psychology, Cautela persuaded me that only through a reliance on the slow but inexorable progress of psychological science could the applications of psychology to clinical problems truly advance. Otherwise, applied and clinical psychology would be doomed to a never-ending reliance on fads of the moment. This was a radical idea at a time, when psychotherapy had little or no empirical base, and it was widely believed that none was needed. Rather, it was thought that human behavior and psychological disorders were far too deep and complex to submit to the rigors of the scientific method.

In 1964, after graduating from Notre Dame, I continued my study with Cautela at Boston College. Publication of Joseph Wolpe's book Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition, in 1958, was beginning to create a stir and by 1964 had convinced Cautela that “behavior therapy” might provide the means to realize the application of the principles of psychological science to the clinic. Having met Wolpe, Cautela arranged for me to spend the summer of 1966 working with Wolpe and acquiring firsthand some clinical skills in the fledgling techniques of systematic desensitization, assertiveness training, and direct behavioral modification based on operant principles.

After Beverly Colby and I were married, we left Boston in 1966 to journey to the University of Vermont. Emboldened with a firm belief in the scientific base of clinical psychology but with few, if any, programs espousing that philosophy, I was fortunate to come in contact with Harold Leitenberg, an experimental psychologist at the University of Vermont, who, teaming up with Stewart Agras from the psychiatry department at that university, was beginning an intensive program of clinical research. This program combined Leitenberg's training and experience in laboratories of operant psychology with Agras's deep clinical experience and his desire to be more empirical.

When Stewart Agras decided it was time to accept a chair in psychiatry in 1969, he invited me, just finishing my PhD, to join him in the search. Since most psychiatry departments were dominated in those days by psychoanalytical approaches and were actively hostile to more behavioral conceptualizations, the search took a while. In the fall of 1969, we finally settled on the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where a small psychiatry department with a short history had recently experienced the exodus of a number of existing faculty, leaving mostly open positions and creating the opportunity to shape a more [Page 44]empirically based department of psychiatry. Agras took full advantage of this opportunity by hiring a number of scientifically orientated psychiatrists and psychologists and asking me, fresh out of school myself, to form a clinical psychology internship program. With strong support from Henry Adams at the University of Georgia and the psychology faculty at the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi, who supported my notion, unusual at the time, that clinical procedures could derive from the basic science of psychology, three interns were accepted to begin training in the fall of 1970.

...