Joseph Wolpe: biography of this South African psychiatrist

The impact that Joseph Wolpe has made on behavioral therapy has been stable and persistent. His dedication to the world of psychology lasted until almost a few months before his death, when he was still lecturing around the world.

Both psychology and psychiatry owe to this prolific psychiatrist the current knowledge and success of the interventions and treatments of any type of phobia from the cognitive-behavioral point of view.

Next we will give a brief review of the life of this researcher through a biography of Joseph Wolpe.

• Related article: "Types of Phobias: Exploring Fear Disorders"

Who was Joseph Wolpe? Short biography

Famous psychiatrist of South African origin, Joseph Wolpe managed to position himself as one of the most influential personalities in behavioral therapy.

Born in South Africa in 1915, Wolpe lived through his academic days at the University of the Witwatersrand. Later he received the Ford Fellowship for pre-doctoral studies, which gave him the possibility of moving for a year to Stanford University, in the United States, where he was able to study psychology at the Center for Human Sciences. Behaviour.

After that year at Stanford University, Wolpe returned to South Africa. However, in 1960, he would return to the United States after accepting a job at the University of Virginia, staying there permanently.

After five years in that institution, Wolpe accepted a position at Temple University in Philadelphia, an institution in which he would remain until 1988.

His involvement in the study of anxiety

One milestone that forever marked Wolpe's life, and influenced his later endeavors, was his enlistment as a medical officer in the South African Army. Wolpe's main motivation in enlisting was to treat soldiers who, after returning from battle, suffered from what at that time was called "war neurosis". Today, this affliction is known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

At that time, the intervention carried out on the soldiers was based on the administration of a type of serum known as “truth serum”, Under the belief that talking openly about traumatic experiences cured this type of neurosis. However, the treatment was rarely effective.

It was this failure of results that made Wolpe, a staunch supporter of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic theories, he questioned this type of intervention and begin to investigate other treatment options.

This change in the direction of his interests as a mental health professional led him to develop his work within the field of behavioral psychology. Reciprocal inhibition techniques, specifically systematic desensitization, were the ones that earned him a place of honor in the history of psychology books.

Joseph Wolpe died in the city of Los Angeles in 1997, at the age of 82.

• Related article: "History of Psychology: main authors and theories"

Wolpe's contributions to psychology

As mentioned above, Wolpe's leap from analytical psychology to the more cognitive-behavioral paradigms, caused him to introduce great changes and contributions in this area.

The most important of these are reciprocal inhibition techniques, and the famous systematic desensitization (DS). When reviewing the life and work of Joseph Wolpe, it is essential to know this type of therapeutic resources, one of his main contributions to mental health.

Reciprocal inhibition techniques

In his quest for more effective interventions and treatments for psychiatric conditions, specifically for the treatment of anxiety; Wolpe developed his reciprocal inhibition techniques, which were based on assertiveness training.

Wolpe's idea of ​​reciprocal inhibition was based on generating in patients feelings or responses that were incompatible with the feeling of anxiety, and thus reduce the levels of this.

At the beginning of your investigations Wolpe used cats to which he offered food while presenting a conditioned fear stimulus, using the act of eating as a way to inhibit the anxiety response.

After achieving successful results with cats, Wolpe used reciprocal inhibition on his clients in the form of assertiveness training. The psychiatrist's hypothesis was that a person is not capable of being aggressive, or experiencing feelings of irritation or anger, at the same time as assertive feelings or behaviors.

These assertiveness trainings proved to be especially useful for patients who had symptoms of anxiety before social situations or some type of social phobia. However, these interventions lacked positive results for other types of phobias.

As a result of this failure to improve the rest of the phobias, Wolpe developed his most well-known intervention protocol in psychology, systematic desensitization (SD). According to which, when a patient faces her fears directly, extreme feelings of frustration can be generated, so the best way to overcome them was to gradually expose oneself.

Systematic desensitization

Wolpe developed and perfected an action protocol for the treatment of phobias that he called Systematic Desensitization (DS).

Routine desensitization consists of gradually presenting the patient with a series of images or contexts to which he may feel some kind of phobia, while he performs a series of relaxation exercises.

Wolp's main idea is that no person can feel relaxed and anxious at the same time, so relaxation would inhibit feelings of anxiety or fear that the patient experiences towards any object or situation.

There are three steps or stages within this protocol, which must be carried out after the clinician conduct a comprehensive case formulation, or what Wolpe called behaviour".

These steps within systematic desensitization are:

1. First step: training in relaxation techniques

Wolpe embraced the muscle relaxation model proposed by Jacobson, modifying it so that it was something shorter and more efficient.

In this first stage, the professional must teach the patient relaxation techniques so that, later, they can be carried out in the next steps of the treatment.

• Related article: "Jacobson's Progressive Relaxation: use, phases and effects"

2. Step two: create a hierarchy of anxieties

During this second stage, the therapist and the patient draw up a list with a series of situations or contexts that generate feelings of anxiety in the person, in any of its forms.

They are then ranked or ordered starting with those with the least degree of anxiety or stress until reaching the one that causes the most feeling of dread in the patient.

3. Step three: systematic desensitization

The next and last stage consists of the patient putting into practice the relaxation exercises learned in the first one, getting him to relax completely. Meanwhile, the clinician will show or relate the different images extracted from the previous step, starting with those with the least degree of anxiety.

Depending on the patient's reaction, the patient will move on to the next higher grade image or the process will be repeated until the anxiety levels have decreased.

Despite the possible failures that may arise during the process, such as the order of the images not being adequate or the patient not being able to relax, systematic desensitization has proven to be one of the most successful interventions in treating phobias se refers.