Historical Antecedents of Behavior Modification and Therapy

Description of the Strategy

Behavior modification and behavior therapy have a short history of a few decades (four or five), but a long past. It goes back to the first thoughts concerning human nature, health and illness, and mental disorders and their etiology and their treatment. In modern times, it begins with the applications of learning theory, of the procedures of classical conditioning and operant conditioning to clinical and educational problems.

This is an area of knowledge that began humbly at the end of the 1950s, but which grew tremendously in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Today, this has become an essential pillar; it is part of the mainstream of clinical psychology and of psychiatry, and it has changed from being a controversial approach to being an “orthodox approach.” All of this happened in a few decades, the last ones of the 20th century.

Remote Antecedents

In the first registered civilizations, the explanations of “different” behavior were based in demonology. People who acted in an abnormal way were supposed to be possessed by bad spirits, and exorcism was the treatment to eliminate those spirits. In Greece, Rome, Christianity, and the first American civilizations, this was the accepted view. In the Middle Ages, demonology became the dominant explanation of maladaptive behavior.

Only in the Renaissance and the years following it did biological explanations start to be considered. This led to a more humane rather than harsh treatment and to an important reorganization of the treatment institutions. In the following centuries, above all, in Europe, they continued with this tradition of biologically explaining the so-called mental illnesses. This identification of psychological disorders with organic pathology had a great influence.

However, that “medical model” of mental illnesses, as it came to be known much later, received a lot of criticism. There were many gaps in our knowledge of causes, development, evolution, and treatment of mental illnesses. The organic causes were not clear in the majority of the cases, and for most of the mental illnesses, no evidence existed of organic pathology.

The alternative movement was to find psychological causes and psychological treatments. Hypnosis, suggestion, and Mesmerism developed treatment strategies and were very popular. It was considered that neuroses could be treated with methods such as suggestion or Mesmerism. Within this tradition, psychoanalysis appeared, mainly due to Sigmund Freud[Page 330](1856–1939). This made up a very broad and influential effort to understand deviate behavior.

Psychoanalysis adopted an intrapsychic-disease model of abnormal behavior. The psychological processes of action were proposed as an explanation of the maladaptive behavior and of the psychological symptoms. The system was broadly developed, although the bulk of psychoanalytic theory was not readily open to scientific verification. Its therapeutic efficiency was also brought into question, its value as an explanation, and the fact of ignoring the cultural and sociological variables that limit its applicability.

Behavior therapy was initially presented as an alternative to psychoanalysis and to the organic explanations. It came from basic research in psychology and in laboratory situations with animals and with human participants. It had solid scientific backing. It emphasized overt behavior and was applied not only to psychiatric patients but also to retarded children, clinical populations in a broad sense, and so on.

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