Cautela, Joseph R.

Joseph R. Cautela was born in Boston on February 21, 1927, a city in which he was to remain his entire life. His parents were immigrants from Sicily, and Cautela grew up in a working-class suburb of Boston, graduating from high school in 1944. After the untimely death of his mother, his father relocated back to their home in Sicily in 1969, where Joseph and his family were to visit him often over the ensuing decades. Early on, Cautela displayed a logical and inquisitive mind and a dedication to hard work that led to marked academic success, and he entered Boston College, graduating in 1949. Following graduation, he began graduate school at Boston University, where, under the mentorship of Leo Renya, he received a PhD in experimental psychology in 1954. While working on his PhD, he taught part-time at his alma mater, Boston College, and also consulted to the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, now the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Upon earning his PhD, he immediately returned to Boston College as an assistant professor, earning the rank of professor in 1966 and, ultimately, retiring in 1986.

In the early years, Cautela was an extraordinarily busy man. With a growing family to support and a great deal of energy and dedication to his field, he would squeeze every last minute out of every day. He would be up very early in the morning, carving out several hours of writing time.

After concluding his writing, he would commute to his office at Boston College, where he would teach three courses a semester and, most often, another course in the evening school at least one night a week. Cautela also availed himself of other opportunities to teach in the summer and, as an excellent teacher, found no shortage of opportunities. At the end of this very long day, he would then retire to an office in his home, where he would begin seeing private patients from 7 to as late as 11 o'clock or midnight. Despite this punishing schedule, he always seemed to be fresh and always made time for his graduate students at Boston College, whether in his office at school or in his office at home.

As a thoroughly trained Hullian learning theorist, Cautela produced a body of important work on the fundamental properties of learning and conditioning early in his career. Two of the articles emerging from this line of research were “The Effect of Drive on Probability Learning” and “The Problem of Backward Conditioning.” But it was the second phase of Cautela's career that was to immortalize him.

His approach to clinical work in those early years was flavored by the prevailing psychodynamic orientation that he had picked up in some clinical training and work-related experiences during the 1950s. But Leo Renya had introduced Cautela to Skinner, Ferster, Lindsley, and later Wolpe when Cautela was a graduate student during the 1950s; and with his strong background in learning theory, he would integrate principles of learning into his clinical work.

In fact, Cautela had read with great interest the work of Joseph Wolpe, first published in 1958, and the subsequent case studies, mostly from England in the early 1960s, heralding the birth of a new approach to therapy called “behavior therapy.” Cautela credited Wolpe's book as the inspiration that refocused his [Page 184]career in the early 1960s. At that time, he took a month out of his busy schedule to attend an institute offered by Wolpe. It was during this period that everything came together in Cautela's professional life. With his comprehensive knowledge of the intricacies of the principles of learning and the clinical expertise he had developed through years of experience (he was a superb therapist), Cautela very quickly joined the early ranks of behavior therapists and became one of the 5 to 10 “founding fathers” of this nascent intellectual movement.

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