Background
The use of exposure as a mode of therapy began in the 1950s during the behavior therapy movement, a time when the psychoanalytic view dominated Western psychology and behavioral therapists first emerged. South African psychologists and psychiatrists, who brought their methods to England and the Maudsley Hospital training program, first used exposure as a mode of therapy to reduce pathological fears, such as phobias and anxiety-related problems.
One of the first psychologists to spark interest in resolving clinical problems from a behavioral point of view, Joseph Wolpe (1915–1997) sought consultation with other behavioral psychologists similar in methodology. James G. Taylor (1897–1973), working in the psychology department of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, was among the psychologists Wolpe sought discussion with. Although most of his work went unpublished, Taylor was the first recorded psychologist to use an exposure therapy treatment for anxiety, including methods of situational exposure with response prevention—a common exposure therapy technique still being utilized. Since the 1950s and the behavior therapy movement, several modes of exposure therapy have proliferated, including systematic desensitization, flooding, implosive therapy, prolonged exposure therapy, in vivo exposure therapy, and imaginal exposure therapy.
Read more about this topic: Exposure Therapy
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)