Behaviour therapy, sometimes also called behaviour modification, developed initially during the 1950s through the work of people like B.F. Skinner (1953) and Joseph Wolpe (1958). The attempt was to create an approach to intervention that relied on experimentally tested principles of learning. In its earliest years the emphasis in behaviour therapy was on classical and operant conditioning and throughout the 1960s and thereafter a number of therapeutic techniques were developed that purportedly rested on these experimental foundations. The word ‘purportedly’ is used intentionally here because an ongoing scientific controversy has surrounded the extent to which behaviour therapy techniques truly derive their effectiveness from learning principles developed primarily from infrahuman experimentation. Suffice it to say that the most innovative techniques came from practising clinicians whose thinking was guided and enriched by their awareness of certain learning principles and by their creative attempts to apply them in the complex and often chaotic domain of clinical intervention. There is considerable evidence from numerous research settings worldwide that many of these techniques are helpful for dealing with a wide range of psychological disorders (see Davison et al., 2004). This chapter will provide a historical overview of the development on behaviour therapy, followed by a description of some of the techniques encompassed by this approach, and conclude with a consideration of some conceptual issues in behaviour therapy.

An early behaviour therapy effort was by Andrew Salter (1949), whose book Condition reflex therapy represented an attempt to rationalize assertion training in Pavlovian conditioning terms.