Joseph Wolpe Essay

He was the second president of the Behavioral Therapy Advancement Association. In 1995, he was awarded a championship in the Association due to his clinical and experimental research that was cited as having an impact in the field of psychotherapy. (Share, pg. 267), stresses that Wolpe was the founder of psychotherapy technique of systematic assertiveness training and desensitization that inspired the foundation of researchers and offered the pathway for the establishment of additional methods. Wolpe's work in the field has become very popular together with his two measurement systems namely the Fear Survey schedule and the Subjective Survey Subject. He claimed that unassertive people could compare to those experiencing phobia although both are triggered by different situations. The emphasis of Assertive Training is that both people with fear and unassertiveness can unlearn their phobia with regular training on how to acquire new behaviors.

(Guercio, pg. 4), says that Wolpe used this technique to teach them on relaxation and ways of conquering their phobias. He realized that level of anxiety would be suppressed if the stimulus was presented in a repeated graded interval. This phase helps therapists to create the plan for the interventions. The third phase, the patient practices the relaxation techniques starting with the least fear of the most complex situation. The practice of relaxation technique depends on the situation of fear, and thus they continue until they feel relaxed and no more fear of the situation. Then, they persist to the other level of fear until the entire hierarchy is dealt with completely. The process of intervention involves at least 4-5 sessions, and it may persist to 12 sessions depending on the nature of fear.

After four years follow up, the man’s fear of urine had completely dissipated. Wolpe went further and developed a tool for measuring the level of anxiety in patients in 1969. The tool is called Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale with the scale ranging from 0 to 10 and is used for self-assessment. According to (Kos, NP) the SUDS scale is used in psychotherapeutic interventions such as desensitization of eye movement, emotional freedom technique and therapies focused on Trauma. It measures the intensity of the subjective distress or disturbances being experienced. The systematic desensitization has been found as the most consistent and effective practice in the treatment of anxiety and fear. The procedure involves recalling of events that cause fear through imagination followed by relaxation practice that is applied to dissolve the anxiety.