Franks, Cyril, M.

To span three continents, 50 years of behavior therapy, hundreds of professional publications and formal addresses worldwide, plus decades of postdoctoral training and administration in less than 1,300 words is a formidable undertaking.

Born in Wales, in the United Kingdom, in 1923, and raised in a pleasant Welsh seaside town, I attended an elite state-financed grammar school from 1935 until 1941. Latin and classical Greek were compulsory, and, for the few Jewish students, after-school Hebrew classes and Jewish cultural programs were optional for those who, like me, so chose. In addition, weekly Welsh language classes were compulsory for all students despite the fact that virtually no one in our community used Welsh, if they understood it at all, as their primary tongue. Thus, I was expected to become familiar with three very different alphabets (Greek, Hebrew, and English) and learn a total of five languages in addition to the customary core of intensive academic education and my elected specialization in applied science. This was compounded by a plethora of escalating wartime stresses and necessary restrictions due to mounting food shortages and more.

Little of the above seemed to have interfered significantly with my ability to make the best of circumstances until nightly bombing of my town began. On two occasions, near misses damaged our family home. Soon afterward, our magnificent 300-year-old school building was totally destroyed, and 10% of my schoolmates and two teachers were killed or injured. Regardless, classes continued on the grounds of my ravaged school.

After grammar school graduation, I was directed to enroll in an accelerated University of Wales Applied Science Program. Upon graduating in 1943 with a BS in electronics and applied physics, I was immediately assigned to an appropriate research and development company near London.

Shortly afterward, the war ended. But by then, while still science oriented, my future career path had shifted to the burgeoning new field of clinical psychology, about which I then knew virtually nothing. Having no formal training in psychology, I had to take several years of basic university courses and pass the university-prescribed psychology equivalent examination.

At this point, I began my search for appropriate doctoral training in clinical psychology. Apparently, in those times, the late 1940s, all clinical psychology training programs worldwide, and these were few, were unequivocally Freudian and totally devoid of data and accountability. Perhaps worse yet, in those days, only physicians were sanctioned by the medical establishment to practice therapy, and private practice by psychologists did not yet exist. Parenthetically, in sharp contrast, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, any qualified mental health professional, including PhD clinical psychologists, can now engage in any kind of legally sanctioned therapy, and in both countries, the major issue now concerns the circumstances under which qualified psychologists [Page 310]should be legally permitted to prescribe medication. We have come a long way.

Around 1949, I found the only clinical training program in either the United Kingdom or North America that seemed to offer promise of meeting all my needs. This was a program created by Professor Eysenck, then rapidly becoming the leading figure in British Psychology. At the University of London Institute of Psychiatry, Eysenck offered two programs, a 1-year clinical internship and a 3- to 4-year PhD program in experimental/clinical psychology. Prior to final acceptance, I had to take additional psychology courses elsewhere because of my unusual proposed entry into the field.

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