Behaviourism and Clinical Psychiatry.

The term &dquo;behaviourism&dquo; is often used by clinical psychiatrists in a pejorative sense, to denote crude, over-simplified and animal-centred types of interpretation which fall far short of the complexity of human conduct, the cognitive interpretation deemed necessary for clinical cases, and the methods of therapy based upon these. Such comments are not usually based on any knowledge of the developments which have taken place in behaviourism generally, and the theory of conditioning in particular, since the early days of Watson, or even Skinner. Old-style methodological behaviourism has given way to neo-behaviourism, or even the modern version of dialectical behaviourism, and these modern theories include a great deal of cognitive behaviour as well as the recognition (as indeed did Pavlov’s early work), that words can act both as conditioned stimuli and conditioned responses. In other words, criticism of modern behaviourism must be based on thorough knowledge of what it actually stands for, rather than vague shibboleths, relevant to a form of the theory 60 years out of date (Eysenck, 1982). It is not always realised that the laws of conditioning and extinction provide an excellent interpretation of the acquisition and treatment of neurotic disorders of all kinds (Eysenck, 1980). Let us consider for a moment enuresis nocturna. This provides an excellent exampl