I SPRINTED THROUGH THE Penn PhD program in two years and eight months, eclipsing the all-time Penn psychology record. The disenfranchised life of a graduate student grated on me, and I soon accepted my first job: assistant professor of psychology at Cornell University. I asked my students to call me Marty, the nickname I’ve had since Dickie Fink bestowed it upon me at age eleven, rather than “Doctor Seligman.” I hoped this would break down the psychological distance between undergraduate and professor, and I’ve kept this moniker all my life. No one but my sister Beth and my parents—and I myself—calls me Martin.
In work and in life, I strove to be an intellectual, the old-fashioned kind. My loyalty was—and still is—to the big questions, not just to those that were fashionable within psychology or philosophy. I read widely, from literary classics to thrillers to history to the obscure academic journals. I listened to classical music—Monteverdi to Mahler—in my “spare” time. I kept trying to “improve” myself. I took no time off.
I also had a skeptical nature. I scoured for the most “basic” accepted premises in psychology and asked what followed if the premises were wrong. My reflexive loyalty was to the ideas that needed defenders.
As with my PhD studies, I tried to do all of this in a hurry. I wanted to finish things, and I was brash. I took shortcuts. Wrapped up in my own thoughts, I didn’t listen well, drifting inward almost immediately to play mentally with how what I was hearing fitted the issues I had been pondering. People thought that I was riding roughshod over them, but I think this was a side effect of such self-absorption. I was puzzled about why they didn’t much like me.
I was ambitious, and I knew what I was ambitious for. Peter Madison’s personality inventories stayed with me, and my ambition was to be like Wittgenstein, surrounded by devoted students and followers.
Finally, I was negative. The academic questions I asked were about helplessness, hopelessness, trauma, fear, and depression. My critical antennae were always up, and I easily found flaws. My mood was congruent: I was anxious and grumpy a lot.
“THEY’VE GOT YOU by the balls, Joe,” shouted Jim Geer merrily.
This was my introduction to the haute monde of psychiatry. Philadelphia in 1967 was right at the cutting edge of a revolution. The epicenter of the revolution was Joe Wolpe’s monthly salon, held in the cavernous living room of his hypermodern house in Merion, a western suburb of Philadelphia. His salon had become a magnet for behavior therapists from all over the northeastern United States.
Psychoanalysis had dominated American psychiatry—both in academia and in the therapy trenches—for forty years. This was not a benign tyranny. Following Freud’s example and that of the traditional, authoritarian European professor, dissenters were drummed out of the profession. But the dike had sprung two leaks, and the torrent was starting.
One was drugs.1 In the 1950s Thorazine was tried out on paranoid schizophrenics, and their delusions seem to melt away. Depressives given imipramine, an antitubercular, sang and danced in the corridors. Worried housewives took Valium and, Stepford-like, seemed content.
The other was behavior therapy. Its founder was Joe Wolpe, the guy Jim thought we had by the balls. Joe was a recent emigrant from a hostile—both to his politics and to his science—South Africa. He was in his mid-forties, bald, pugnacious, outspoken, and iconoclastic. In his horn-rimmed glasses, he reminded me of an owl, wise, yes, but also ready to pounce on a prey. He had accomplished something that no one else in psychiatry had done before.
Joe treated anxiety disorders, his specialty being phobias. Phobics are deathly afraid of specific objects, such as cats or spiders or going shopping. They were routinely treated by psychoanalysts who probed for the underlying, unresolved childhood conflict of which the object of the adult fear was but a symbol. In the classic case, Little Hans,2 at the age of four, saw a horse fall down in a Vienna street. He became terrified of horses. Freud interpreted this as a fear that his father would castrate him, a fear that Hans had displaced onto horses. Hans, duly enlightened, was said by his father to recover.
Crucial to the Freudian theory of phobia, and to Freud’s theory of all mental disorders, was the premise that an underlying problem causes the symptoms, just as an underlying spirochete causes the symptoms of syphilis. Joe thought this was hogwash. The symptom of the phobia itself caused the phobia. A cat phobic had no underlying conflict; she was just terrified of cats. Period.
And Joe set out to prove it. The cat phobic, he theorized, must have previously had a traumatic experience in a place where cats happened to be. Her father might, for example, have spanked her when a cat was in the same room. By Pavlovian conditioning, the previously neutral cat became a stimulus that now evoked fear. If Joe was right, the therapeutic course was clear. Extinguish the conditioned fear, and the phobia would vanish!
Extinction should occur if the therapist got the patient up off the couch and presented cats to her now, but paired with no fear. Easier said than done, since presenting a cat in the consulting room would precipitate panic, not extinction. But Joe invented a way to do it and dubbed it “systematic desensitization.”
First Joe had the patient learn “whole body relaxation,” in which she relaxed every muscle in her body. Profound relaxation is a motor response incompatible with fear—you can’t be afraid when you are relaxed. (Joe liked incompatible motor responses as explanations of extinction, and we will soon hear him invoke them in an argument with Steve and me.) Next Joe had the relaxed patient imagine someone named “Katz.” No fear occurred. Then he had her imagine the word “cat.” No fear occurred. Joe kept going up her fear hierarchy while she relaxed, being careful to be sure she exhibited no fear, only relaxation. Joe had her imagine a cat. Finally he brought a cat into the consulting room and sprung it on the patient. Lo and behold, the phobia was gone.3
This actually worked. Joe cured several patients and showed thereby that a mere symptom of a mental illness, not some underlying conflict, was its cause. He did it by actually curing the mental illness and thus became the most famous heretic in the world of psychiatry. Systematic desensitization and its first cousins are still the treatment of choice for phobia sixty-five years later.
Joe, also a foe of apartheid, became persona non grata in his racist homeland. He fled South Africa for Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia and finally settled in Philadelphia at Temple University in 1965. He and his quiet wife, Stella, held a monthly salon, and Steve and I attended. Aside from Jim Geer, there was Arnold Lazarus (soon to be expelled, and never forgiven, for the heresy of eclecticism—using cognition in therapy excluded him from the ranks of pure Wolpean therapists), Albert Stunkard (obesity researcher and the chair of psychiatry at Penn), Aaron (Tim) Beck (soon to become the leading light in depression), Paul Brady (who had cured stuttering behaviorally), and more than a dozen others.
We were invited to present our work on learned helplessness. About ten minutes into our presentation, Joe—who had been scowling since our first mention of cognition—burst in. “Cognitive? Nonsense—your 'helpless' dogs have learned a competing motor response. In the hammock shock goes off every so often when the dog happens to be still. That reinforces the motor response of lying still. In the shuttle box, when shock goes on, they lie still because they have been rewarded for not moving before in the hammock, and they get further reinforcement for lying still when the shock finally terminates. So learned helplessness is completely explained by tried-and-true behavioral principles.”
Steve and I had anticipated this clever objection. In fact, it was by then the very subject of Steve’s doctoral dissertation. Like Joe, the Skinnerians proposed a “superstitious” reinforcement explanation of helplessness. They claimed that in the hammock, shock offset occasionally got paired accidentally with not moving, and this “superstitiously” reinforced the association of not moving with relief. Hence, in the shuttle box the “helpless” dogs engaged in not moving and eventually shock ceased—further strengthening the association between no-movement and relief. So learned helplessness was fueled not by a cognition that actions didn’t matter but merely by good old Skinnerian response-reinforcement learning.
“Joe, make a prediction,” I ventured. “Imagine that instead of accidentally allowing just a few accidental pairings of shock offset and motionlessness in the hammock, we go one better. We turn the shock off only when the dog is motionless. Every time the dog is completely still for five seconds, the shock stops. What would be learned?”
“The dog will learn to stand still, of course,” Joe answered.
“Now imagine we yoke another dog to the first one, with shock going off at exactly the same time, but independent of its responses. It might get an occasional superstitious pairing, but which dog will have learned the stronger competing motor response?”
“The first dog,” Joe said.
There are not many entirely decisive experiments in the history of science, but this was one. Steve had run a special escapable-shock group in the hammock: for this group shock terminated only when the dog held still, explicitly reinforcing not moving—one-step stronger than mere superstition. The cognitive theory predicted that these animals would not lie still in the shuttle box since they had learned that they could control shock—albeit by not moving, whereas behavior theory predicted that they would show the competing response of lying still, which according to behaviorists was all that “helplessness” amounted to.
Steve told Joe the results: all the dogs in this motionless escapable-shock group easily learned to escape in the shuttle box by jumping the barrier. Learned helplessness was cognitive, not the competing motor response of not moving reinforced by a few accidental shock offsets.4 QED.
“They’ve got you by the balls, Joe!” shouted Jim merrily.
Joe conceded gracefully. He cornered me at the end of the meeting and invited me to spend time with him at his anxiety ward to show me how very powerful behavioral principles were in the clinic. He took me under his wing, and I had my first actual look at mental illness.
“SEE THAT FELLOW who just walked into the men’s room? Follow him in,” Joe instructed me. We were in the anxiety ward of Haverford State Hospital, and the gentleman whom Joe told me to follow into the bathroom was middle-aged and beautifully attired in a tailor-made dark blue suit.
“When he goes to pee, take the next urinal, unzip, and stare at him,” Joe instructed.
I did as Joe asked. Next urinal, unzip, stare. The man peed, he zipped up, he stepped back, and so did I. Joe walked in beaming. The gentleman threw his arms around me and exclaimed with tears in his eyes, “You’ve cured me!”
Joe explained. This patient had a urinary phobia. He couldn’t pee in a public restroom. He stood in front of the urinal waiting until the room emptied out, which in his office building could take fifteen minutes or more. He then let go, but if anyone walked in, he froze again. His absences had been noted, and people were gossiping about all the time he spent in the men’s room.
He had been through systematic desensitization for the last month, starting with relaxing while hearing Joe say the word “urinate” and progressing upward through more fearful, imagined scenarios. The acme of his fear hierarchy was actually peeing with a stranger standing next to him and staring. He did it. He peed. Joe asserted that the urinary phobia stemmed not from an underlying conflict, like anxiety that he might be homosexual, that required resolving but merely from a fear of peeing in public. The gentleman was cured.
JOE AND I became friends, and although he disagreed with me about cognition in mental illness until the very end of his life, we found common ground, and he held my hand on my first baby step to becoming a clinical psychologist.