Systematic Desensitization

1958

Mary Cover Jones (1897–1987), Joseph Wolpe (1915–1997)

In 1924, American developmental psychologist Mary Cover Jones published her test of a variety of strategies to reduce a young child’s fear of a white rabbit. She discovered that the strategy of direct conditioning was most effective. In this technique, a pleasant, relaxing stimulus (such as food) was presented simultaneously with the rabbit. As the rabbit was gradually brought closer in the presence of the child’s favorite food, the child grew more tolerant and was eventually able to touch it without fear. For many years Jones’s work was forgotten.

In the 1950s, Joseph Wolpe, a South African physician, began developing systematic desensitization to treat anxiety disorders. Frustrated with the slow progress of talk therapy, Wolpe thought that he could “countercondition” anxiety by pairing it with a stimulus or activity that was incompatible with the feeling of anxiety. He initially called this treatment “psychotherapy by reciprocal inhibition”—his book of the same name was published in 1958—but today the technique is known as systematic desensitization.

Systematic desensitization helps people gradually lose their fears using the reciprocal inhibition method. Progressive muscle relaxation, pioneered by physician Edmund Jacobson in 1938, is used as the countercondition. The patient is first trained to relax and to maintain the relaxed state. The feared object, thought, or situation is then presented in its mildest, most nonthreatening form. As the patient is able to maintain the relaxed state, the next least-threatening form of the fear or anxiety is presented. This continues, usually over a number of sessions, until the person can actually encounter the fear or anxiety stimulus in its previously most threatening form and still remain relaxed. The patient is said to have unlearned the fear.

After Wolpe developed this method, he and other behavior therapists discovered that the technique of systematic desensitization had actually been formulated much earlier by Jones. For her early work, Jones was christened “the mother of behavior therapy.”

SEE ALSO Classical Conditioning (1903), Operant Chamber (1930), Token Economy (1961)

Systemic desensitization allows people to gradually overcome phobias, such as acrophobia (fear of heights), using the reciprocal inhibition method.