Psychoanalysis and Behavior Therapy
LEE BIRK M.D.1, and
$$Word$$ W. BRINKLEY-BIRK PH.D.2
1 Clinical and Research Director, Learning Therapies, Inc., 398 Walnut St., Newton, Mass. 02160 and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.
2 Research Consultant and Clinical Associate, Learning Therapies, Inc., 398 Walnut St., Newton, Mass. 02160
Psychoanalysis and behavior therapy developed within separate, contrasting, and seeminingly incompatible scientific/epistemological traditions. Psychoanalysis was founded by clinicians who were trying to "make sense of" introspective self-report data, while while behavior therapy was founded by experimentalists who were empolyzing the data of direct observation, explicitly excluding consideration of private (subjective) events. Over the past decade, a growing acknowledgment of the clinical utility and scope of behavioral methods has reduced chauvinistic sparring and has led to greater mutual respect, as well as to some pioneering collaborative work. Although the theoretical determinants of psychoanalysis and behavior therapy are both historically and philosophically context-dependent and represent no absolute deterrent to genuine theoretical synthesis, until now there has been no real consensus about the need for or form of a conceptual integration. The authors here propose that this is not only possible but necessary in order to preserve all the data of the clinical therapeutic process.
