โ Scribed by Rachael Rosner
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This book is one of a series of biographies on Key Figures in Counselling and Psychotherapy. The aim is to provide a "concise and accessible" introduction to the life and work of behavior therapist Joseph Wolpe. Wolpe, who began his psychiatric career at the Kimberely military hospital in South Africa during World War II, pioneered the application of learning principles to the treatment of anxiety and other disorders. He is best known as one of the leading figures in the behavior therapy movement. And, as Roger Poppen portrays it, Wolpe's antagonism towards psychoanalysis has defined his work almost as clearly as his commitment to behavior therapy.
These two ideas -Wolpe's development of behavior therapy and his antagonism towards psychoanalysis -provide the respective manifest and latent themes of the book. The former makes up the bulk of the biography, providing a good picture of Wolpe's research as it developed in the context of others doing similar work. But the latter theme, though it takes up less room, is the thorn in the book's side. Wolpe actually began his career (like most psychiatrists in World War II) adhering to Freudian principles. His emergent behavior therapy was a reaction against the "religious mysticism" of psychoanalytic constructs and against what he saw as the "unscientific" methods of psychoanalytic research. Poppen (who is a follower of Wolpe) polemically highlights throughout the book the oppressive psychoanalytic climate in which Wolpe was forced to defend himself. There is no question that this book is a defense of Wolpe. Had Poppen made this agenda more overt, then the book might have packed a strong, if partisan, punch. But his partisanship seems to have seeped into what was otherwise supposed to be, by all accounts, a simple "introduction" to Wolpe's work.
Poppen's book, nonetheless, is a good encyclopedia of Wolpe's work, providing excruciating detail about his emergent theory, techniques, and institutional affiliations. He delineates well some of the fundamental tenets of behavior therapy that Wolpe contributed: reciprocal inhibition, systematic desensitization, hierarchy construction, anxiety as learned response. As the first formal biography of Wolpe it distinguishes them clearly from those contributions of his former student, Arnold Lazarus, and others such as Skinner and Bandura. Poppen's diligent exposition of the breadth and depth of Wolpe's work is admirable.
The overall effect of the book, however, is weak. Poppen provides no compelling argument about Wolpe apart from their shared desire to fight the good fight against psychoanalysis. Part of the difficulty is the way in which he has organized the material. The series editor, Windy Dryden, has prescribed a format for presenting the material which is useful for textbook introductions but which hinders the development of a critical biographical argument.
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