Behavioral therapy is a term that describes a broad range of techniques used to change maladaptive behaviors.And to bolster this claim that psychology was a science, and to fill out his textbook, he borrowed from anatomy and physiology, and Pavlov took the same line by insisting that his experiments on
behavior were really "an investigation of the physiological activity of the cerebral cortex," although neither man could point to any direct observations of the nervous system which threw light on
behavior. They were also forced into hasty interpretations of complex behavior, Watson arguing that thinking was merely subvocal speech and Pavlov that language was simply a "second signal system."The first explicit behaviorist was John B. Watson, who in 1913
issued a kind of manifesto called Psychology as the Behaviorist
Views It. As the title shows, he was not proposing a new science
but arguing that psychology should be redefined as the study of
behavior.Watson himself had made important observations of instinctive
behavior and was, indeed, one of the first ethologists ni the modern spirit, but he was greatly impressed by new evidence of what an organism could learn to do, and he made some rather extreme claims about the potential of a newborn human infant.Among the behavioral facts at hand were reflexes and conditioned
reflexes, and Watson made the most of them, but the reflex
suggested a push-pull type of causality not incompatible with the
nineteenth-century conception of a machine.The same impression
was given by the work of the Russian physiologist Pavlov,
published at about the same time, and it was not corrected by the
stimulus- response psychology which emerged during the next three or four decades.Unlike the types of therapy that are rooted in insight (such as psychoanalytic therapy and humanistic therapies), behavioral
therapy is action-based.A shortage of facts is always a problem in a new science, but ni Watson's aggressive program in a field as vast as human behavior it was especially damaging.Watson naturally emphasized the most reproducible results he could find, and most of them had been obtained from animals the white rats of animal psychology and Pavlov's dogs.Because of this, behavioral therapy tends to be highly focused.