[4] As Gerald Davison wrote, "Those of us who knew Salter personally appreciated his sheer brilliance, his wit, his warmth, decency and consideration for others, his supportiveness, his keen intuitive grasp of human nature, his infectious zest for life, his love of art and literature, and his devotion to family and friends.
(CRT, p. 238)[5] Salter graduated from Morris High school in the Bronx, New York, and entered the uptown campus of NYU in 1931, majoring in physics.
(CRT, p. 238)[5] He read widely about yogis and mystics, about popular ideas on hypnosis through the years, and about the mastery of suggestibility practiced by the stage and parlor magicians he had encountered as an adolescent.
Within a few years he had developed his ideas sufficiently to write the article Three Techniques of Autohypnosis,[1] eventually accepted by Clark Hull for the Journal of General Psychology after he “Americanized” his name from Saltzman.
This early work can be seen as a major step toward cognitive behavior therapy, since it fundamentally involves patients telling themselves things to change how they feel.
(CRT, p. 241)[5] He treated hundreds of patients, honing his methods for brief therapy and constructing an overarching intellectual framework based firmly on the Pavlovian paradigm.
When the book was published, Freud had died just a few years before, Joseph Wolpe was still conducting his early research in South Africa, and psychoanalysis was the dominant approach to treating psychological issues.
“The American century” was well underway—World War II had just ended, the power of modern science had been demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the U.S. economy had doubled in size since 1939.
Wolpe's most famous contribution to psychotherapy, “systematic desensitization by reciprocal inhibition,” is largely based on techniques that Salter introduce in Conditioned Reflex Therapy.
Arnold Lazarus, a student of Wolpe's, first came from South Africa to the U.S. in 1963 on a fellowship to Stanford, permanently relocating in 1966, when he began his influential American career and life-long friendship with Salter.
[11] Salter conceived of this conference, helped to invite speakers and attendees, and funded it with money from a foundation he had established a few years earlier to support various research projects.
Other founders include Reyna, Wolpe, Joseph Cautela, Edward Dengrove, Herbert Fensterheim, Cyril Franks, Leonard Krasner, Arnold Lazarus, Robert Leiberman, John E. Peters, and Dorothy Susskind.
Salter was quite involved in the AABT during its early years, serving on the board and in various official and unofficial capacities, attending the national meetings and often giving presentations which were always well-attended.
Salter's father's work is discussed at length in the book, and he is mentioned in the movie by the chief North Korean brainwasher, Yen Lo.
(CRT, p. 253)[5] Salter maintained his clinical practice in Manhattan until a few months before his death, working earnestly to help them achieve what he always believed was the essential goal of psychotherapy: becoming happy.
These ideas and techniques are the focus of Conditioned Reflex Therapy, formed the basis of his practice until his death, and widely influenced the work of many others to the present day.
Through psychotherapy we manufacture new history, which repeats itself in his new actions.” (CRT, p. 232)[5] His recommended action was of a particular kind: being more excitatory (“assertive” in today's language) in their daily lives.
Anything else is gibberish.” While Salter documented his firm belief that all of his therapeutic techniques were derived directly from the theoretical framework he built on Pavlovian principles, even those who admired his work and practices did not fully share this conviction.
Goldfried and Davison (1976) note that “While many would disagree with [Salter's characterization] of the relationship between his theory and his practice, he nonetheless occupies a central role in the development of behavior therapy.”[14] (p. 5).
As Salter put it, “Autohypnosis completely surmounts this diminution of hypnotic suggestion.”[1] (p. 435) Second, through this ability to voluntarily reinforce the effects of hypnosis, the subject learns to feel—and actually to be—in control.
202–203) As Kazdin wrote in his review of the 2002 edition of Conditioned Reflex Therapy, “[Salter's] leap from learning theory and research to treatments for clinical practice was novel and groundbreaking.”[17] (p. 408) And yet, as Gerald Davison put it in his obituary, “Ironically, being an innovator often makes a given contribution less visible.
67-72)[5][18] in order to substitute a more adaptive behavior for the ‘escape’ and ‘denial’ afforded by ‘hysterical symptoms.’”[19] (p. 262) Similarly, Kazdin[16] says that: “The use of assertive responses had been advocated by Andrew Salter, whose therapy technique was based upon Pavlovian concepts.
Wolpe used assertive responses for inhibiting anxiety in interpersonal situations but interpreted the technique according to the principle of reciprocal inhibition.”[16] (p. 156) “Pavlov's theory inspired a number of applied behavior therapists, most notably Andrew Salter[5][11] who developed his conditioned-reflex therapy.... Wolpe's ‘assertive’ response approach represents a very similar technique and conceptualization.”[5] As part of his excitatory training, Salter encouraged patients to use the word “I” intentionally; indeed, his discussion of General Eisenhower's healthy emotions in CRT.
One of his “six techniques for increasing excitation” is “the deliberate use of the word I as much as possible.” (CRT, p. 68)[5] Fritz Perls' emphasis on “I-Talk”[20] illustrates the importance of this insight.
In the article in Life, the author reports that “The majority of Salter's cases learn the [autohypnosis] routine after five or six interviews, and rarely see him afterwards”[21]—as opposed to the hundreds of sessions commonly required by psychoanalysis.
7-8)[5] CRT introduced the idea of using relaxation via imagery linked to positive affect for reducing phobias and anxieties and for changing behavior such as nail-biting, insomnia, smoking, stuttering, and more complex social problems.
He manipulated imagery to alter the client's mood and feelings in the therapy sessions as well as in his everyday experience to overcome maladaptive reactions such as anxiety.
His obituary in The New York Times also noted his contribution to systematic desensitization: “The therapy Mr. Salter employed encouraged patients to express their emotions and used visual imagery to reduce anxiety.
It also moved people past their fears by gradually getting them accustomed to being around the things they feared.”[2] Salter emphasized the importance of patients being excitatory in their real life outside the office, with spouses, colleagues, friends, and strangers.
His interest in neurology was so great that he and a colleague developed a digital electroencephalograph that was awarded U.S. patent number US 3841309A [24] for “a method of analyzing bioelectric outputs of living things by sensing, amplifying and comparing such outputs with selected predetermined values and providing indications of each occurrence of the departure of a discrete value of such outputs from such predetermined values.”[6] And he anticipated, in general terms, that progress in electronics might revolutionize investigation of mental processes: “[B]y the end of the century... [p]rogress in electronic miniaturization will allow us to check, in our offices, how the patient ‘really’ felt when he visited his mother last Sunday, or got up before an audience, or had an argument with his wife.”[11] (p. 23)