Wolpe, Joseph

One of the seminal figures in behavior therapy, Joseph Wolpe was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1915 and died in Los Angeles in 1997. The grandson of Lithuanian Jews who had fled to South Africa in the late 19th century to escape persecution, Wolpe benefited from a long tradition that valued scholarliness and respect for learning, as well as discipline and hard work. Precocious and bright, he won many scholastic contests as a child and adolescent, even completing college-level chemistry by studying on his own during his high school years.

Wolpe earned his MB (bachelor of medicine, the equivalent of the MD in the United States and other countries) in 1939 and his MD degree (a research degree) in 1948 from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and he served during World War II as a medical officer in the South African army. During this time, he was exposed to what were then called “war neuroses,” now termed posttraumatic stress disorder. Dissatisfied with the drug and psychoanalytic treatments then available—largely the effort to release repressed memories through injections of sodium pentothal—Wolpe looked for other ways to conceptualize and treat anxiety disorders. He was encouraged and guided by an American psychologist, Leo Reyna, in learning about Clark Hull's theorizing and experimental work in psychology, as well as Pavlov's classical conditioning and the experimental induction of neurotic behavior in animals. While in full-time private practice in Johannesburg, he gave lectures and conducted clinical demonstrations to graduate psychology students, among them Arnold Lazarus and S. J. Rachman, and ended up chairing Lazarus's PhD dissertation.

Wolpe's career took him to the United States in 1956 for a year's study at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California, and then in 1960 to the University of Virginia Medical School as professor of psychiatry. In 1967, he moved to Temple University Medical School. Upon his retirement in 1988, he relocated to Los Angeles and remained active as distinguished professor of psychology at Pepperdine University. A principal focus until his death was as founding editor in 1970 with Reyna of the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.

Throughout his academic career, Wolpe was active as a clinician but especially as a tireless proponent of behavior therapy, traveling and lecturing widely and publishing numerous articles and books, among them Behavior Therapy Techniques (in 1966, with Arnold Lazarus), The Practice of Behavior Therapy (1969, the fourth edition appearing in 1990), and probably his best-known and most influential work, Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition, in 1958, discussed in greater detail below. His willingness to demonstrate his behavior therapy work in front of live audiences and on film served as an important complement to Carl Rogers's earlier promulgation of audio recordings to open up what goes on in the consulting room and to conduct controlled research to evaluate its effectiveness.

Among Wolpe's many awards was the Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology from the American Psychological Association (APA), [Page 620]in 1979, and in 1995, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT), an interdisciplinary interest group that he cofounded in 1966 and for which he served as president in 1967 to 1968. AABT has been the leading force in the United States and elsewhere for the study, development, and promotion of experimentally based psychological interventions for a wide range of mental disorders.

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