Joseph Wolpe: 10 (Key Figures in Counselling and Psychotherapy series)

`Presents an accurate and sympathetic picture of an intriguing personality and outstanding scientist... [ Joseph Wolpe] is a doughty fighter in the cause... to make abnormal psychology and psychiatry more scientific and more useful. The presentation of his life, his struggles, his creativity, his successes and his failures is an absorbing account... I think all behaviour therapists, indeed all psychologists and psychiatrists interested in the development of their science , should read this well-written and intensely interesting account of one man's courageous voyage into the unknown' - Hans Eysenck, Behaviour Research and Therapy

`Provides a good picture of Wolpe's research as it developed in the context of others doing similar work... Poppen's book is a good encyclopedia of Wolpe's work, providing detail about his emergent theory, techniques and institutional affiliations. He delineates well some of the fundamental tenets of behavior therapy that Wolpe contributed: reciprocal inhibition, systematic desensitization, hierarchy construction, anxiety as learned response... Poppen's diligent exposition of the breadth and depth of Wolpe's work is admirable... This book is a helpful and informative introduction to Wolpe's work' - Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

`Graduate students will appreciate the thorough, referenced and readable background of cognitive-behavior therapy. Practitioners may welcome the broad review of techniques. And psychologists who were in graduate school when Wolpe was emerging in the 1950s and 1960s... might enjoy a regression to recall interesting, even exhilarating times' - Contemporary Psychology