He graduated from Philadelphia Central High School and then earned his bachelor's degree at Pennsylvania State University.
He then spent eleven years at the Menninger Foundation before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania.
[1] Author of nine books and over 400 articles, he had the rare ability to apply a scientific eye to the personal processes of psychotherapy.
He examined the factors that make psychotherapy work, along with large-scale studies of outcome.
Other measures include The Helping Alliance, which gives a way to study the impact of the therapeutic relationship, and Health–Sickness Rating Scale, which was later adapted to become the Global Assessment of Functioning (Axis V) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), as noted in the DSM-IV.