¶ … history of behaviorism and psychoanalysis. The writer explores the changes the field has undergone since its inception as well as some of the people who were important to those changes. There were six sources used to complete this paper.
Throughout the last fifty years there have been massive changes in the field of therapy. Two of the most common approaches to therapy are behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Each of the approaches has followers who believe that it is the best approach. Each of the approaches has commonalties and differences in their foundations. Each approach was developed to answer need in the clients that the therapists treated and to address the questions of human nature and its reactions to various life events.
BEHAVIORISM
While behaviorism has been credited to John B. Watson, it was Edward Thorndike who started the ball rolling at the turn of the century. He worked at several experiments including one that used wooden crates and dogs and cats. The experiment placed the dogs and cats into the wooden crates and the animals devised ways to escape which proved they could reasonable deduce and that they could repeat past behavior to achieve the same responses (Operant Conditioning and Behaviorism (http://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/genetics/behavior/learning/behaviorism.html).
Thorndike was particularly interested in discovering whether his animals could learn their tasks through imitation or observation. He compared the learning curves of cats who had been given the opportunity of observing others escaping from a box with those who had never seen the box being solved and found no difference in their rate of learning. He obtained the same null result with dogs and, even when he showed the animals the methods of opening a box by placing their paws on the appropriate levers and so on, he found no improvement. He fell back on a much simpler trial and error explanation of learning. Occasionally, quite by chance, an animal performs an action which frees it from the box. When the animal finds itself in the same position again it is more likely to perform the same action again. The reward of being freed from the box somehow strengthens an association between a stimulus, being in a certain position in the box, and an appropriate action. Reward acts to strengthen stimulus-response associations (Operant Conditioning and Behaviorism (http://www.biozentrum.uniwuerzburg.de/genetics/behavior/learning/behaviorism.html)."
This set the stage for Watson to enter the picture and provide the foundation for the later development of behaviorism.
A behaviorism http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0497_DeMar_-_Behaviorism.html)
Just as the father of psychoanalysis is Sigmund Freud there is a father for behaviorism as well. The father of behaviorism has long since been accepted as John B. Watson. It was his work that served as the foundational springboard for an entire approach to therapy that would rival psychoanalysis in many areas while complimenting it in others. As strong as Freud was on the mind being responsible for behavior and actions Watson believed none of that mattered and the field's only concern and focus should remain on the behavior of individuals and groups. He believed that this approach was also important to the development and research of the field because it allowed humans to be studied with the same objectivity and reliability as scientists study rats and apes.
Watson's structured theories are founded in the work of earlier experiments by a scientist called Ivan Pavlov and the famed Pavlov's dog and bell research. In this research Pavlov demonstrated that he could ring a bell as he fed dogs their meals, and each time the dog heard the bell they received food. When they ate they would salivate. It was not long before the bell sound became associated with salivating (Operant Conditioning and Behaviorism (http://www.biozentrum.uniuerzburg.de/genetics/behavior/learning/behaviorism.html)
Eventually he could ring the bell and not show food and the dogs would salivate because of the association they had with the bell to earlier food rewards. This was the experiment that Watson-based much of his behaviorism theories on.
The dogs had been "conditioned" to salivate at the sound of a bell. Pavlov believed, as Watson was later to emphasize, that humans react to stimuli in the same way (Operant Conditioning and Behaviorism (http://www.biozentrum.uniuerzburg.de/genetics/behavior/learning/behaviorism.html)."
Following the work of Watson one must acknowledge the work of a man named B.F. Skinner. Skinner initially made his name known by being one to test Watson's theories in his lab, however the more he tested the more he came to disagree with many aspects of Watson's theories. Watson's theories revolved almost exclusively with reflexes and conditioning as was demonstrated in the bell and dog experiment. Skinner wanted to expand the theory of behaviorism to include environmental habits and factors as well.
People respond to their environment, he argued, but they...
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