Joseph Wolpe: biography of the inventor of systematic desensitization.

We review the life and work of this South African psychiatrist, creator of useful techniques against phobia.

Joseph Wolpe's impact on behavioral therapy has been steady 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 from the cognitive-behavioral point of view.

We will now give a brief overview of the life of this researcher through a biography of Joseph Wolpe.

Who was Joseph Wolpe? Brief 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 spent his academic years at the University of the Witwatersrand. He later received the Ford Fellowship for predoctoral studies, which enabled him to move for a year to Stanford University in the United States, where he was able to pursue his studies in psychology at the Center for Behavioral Sciences.

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

After five years at that institution, Wolpe accepted a position at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he remained for five years.where he remained until 1988.

His involvement in the study of anxiety

A milestone that forever marked Wolpe's life, and influenced his later work, was his enlistment as a medical officer in the South African Army. Wolpe's main motivation for enlisting was to treat soldiers who, after returning from battle, were suffering from what was then called "neuroses, suffering from what was then called "shell shock".. Today, this affliction is known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

At that time, the intervention for soldiers was based on the administration of a type of serum known as "truth serum", in 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 caused Wolpe, a staunch follower of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic theories, to question these types of interventions and began 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. His reciprocal inhibition techniques, specifically systematic desensitization, were what earned him a position of honor in the field of behavioral psychology.were the ones that earned him a place of honor in the history books of psychology.

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

Wolpe's contributions to psychology

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

The most important of these are the reciprocal techniques of inhibition and the famous systematic desensitization (SD). 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 anxietyWolpe 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 reducing anxiety levels.

At the beginning of his research Wolpe used cats to which he offered food while presenting a conditioned fear stimulus, using the act of eating as a stimulus to reduce anxiety levels.using the act of eating as a way of inhibiting 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 presented symptoms of anxiety before social situations or some kind of social phobia. However, these interventions lacked positive results for other types of phobias.

Following this failure to improve other phobias, Wolpe developed his best known intervention protocol in psychology, systematic desensitization (SD). According to which, when a patient is directly confronted with his or her fears, extreme feelings of frustration can be generated, so the best way to overcome them was to expose him or herself gradually.

Systematic desensitization

Wolpe developed and perfected a protocol for the treatment of phobias which he called Systematic Desensitization (SD).

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

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

There are three steps or stages within this protocol, which should be carried out after the clinician performs a thorough case formulation, or what Wolpe called "behavioral analysis".

These steps within systematic desensitization are as follows:

First step: training in relaxation techniques 2.

Wolpe adopted the model of muscular relaxation proposed by Jacobsonand modified it so that it would be somewhat shorter and more effective.

In this first stage, the professional must teach the patient the relaxation techniques so that, later on, he/she can carry them out in the following steps of the treatment.

2. Second step: to create a hierarchy of anxieties

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

Then, they are hierarchized or ordered, starting with the least anxious or stressful until reaching the one that provokes the greatest sensation of dread in the patient.

3. Third step: systematic desensitization

The next and last step consists of the patient putting into practice the relaxation exercises learned in the first step, achieving complete relaxation. In the meantime, the clinician will show or relate the different images extracted from the previous step, starting with the least anxious ones..

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

In spite of the possible failures that may arise during the process, such as the images not being in the right order or the patient not being able to relax, systematic desensitization has proven to be one of the most successful interventions for the treatment of phobias.