Emmelkamp, Paul M. G.

I was born in Baarn, a small village in the Netherlands, February 17, 1949, as one of six children in a Catholic family. I was deemed to become a priest but at the age of 16 had to acknowledge that it would give me considerable difficulty to meet the celibacy requirements. Studying (clinical) psychology seemed a logical extension of my earlier priesthood aspirations, albeit without a real understanding of what the study of psychology actually involved.

When I graduated with a master's degree in clinical psychology at the University of Utrecht in 1971, I decided to stay a few years longer at that university. I succeeded in getting a research grant to conduct a PhD project on the behavioral treatment of agoraphobia, which I completed in 1975, under the direction of Walter Everaerd. At that time, I was highly inspired by the work and ideas of Isaac Marks, a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, in London. In a series of studies, I found that exposure in vivo was much more effective than imaginal exposure. Apart from conducting the studies to be included in my dissertation, I also started research into the behavioral treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder, a research interest, if not a passion, which would stay with me for the rest of my academic life. There is at least one topic on which I agree with Freud, who noted already in 1926, “Obsessional neurosis is unquestionably the most repaying subject of… research.”

Starting in 1971, I obtained broad postdoctoral psychotherapy training at the Institute of Medical Psychotherapy in Utrecht. At that time, I was an angry young man who was highly critical about psychotherapeutic methods that were not evidence based, so I gave my teachers and supervisors of the psychodynamic and experiential therapeutic methods a hard time. However, if I learned anything from those clinicians, it was the importance of the therapeutic relationship, which I still pass on to my own students.

In 1994, I moved to the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Groningen, which was psychodynamically and experientially oriented. Although my behavioral orientation led to some heavy discussions among the staff, I was allowed to continue my research into the effects of behavioral treatments and, after some time, even to give courses on behavior therapy. In this time, my research interest broadened and included now social phobia, marital distress, and the influence of parental rearing on the etiology of psychopathology. In 1986, I became full professor and head of the Department of Clinical Psychology and head of the Clinical Program at the University of Groningen.

When I was a young man madly running about teaching, doing clinical work, and research, I had no grand scheme in my head as to where research would bring me. Looking back now, my research topics were not so much determined by a major plan or my talents, but much more by being in a particular place at the right time and the possibilities of doing research in a particular area, despite my deficiencies. For example, I started my research projects into the treatment of marital distress after a well-known Dutch systems therapist (Donald MacGillavry) joined our group in Groningen and was enthusiastic about collaborating with me in this area. I moved into research into clinical child psychology when a very nice colleague (Ruud Minderaa) became the head of the Department of Child Psychiatry in Groningen and invited me to do research in his department. After becoming head of the Department of Clinical Psychology in Amsterdam in 1996, my interest in conducting research into addiction was gratified by the hospitality of the Jellinek Clinic. This institute was interested in evidence-based treatments and treatment outcome research. In my Groningen years, my interest in doing research in the addiction field was tempered by the near impossibility to get access to patients in primarily psychodynamically oriented addiction centers.

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