ABSTRACT
With the broad and sophisticated approaches extant in behavioral family therapy, it is hard to believe that the first fledgling efforts to apply learning principles to families in distress occurred less than 20 years ago. At that time, the pioneering interventions resembled the tools utilized by laboratory experimentalists. Behaviors of deviant children or adults were pinpointed, counted, and differential consequences were applied to achieve reductions in tantrums, aggression, noncompliance, and symptoms, along with increases in cooperation, social conversation, household chores, and shared recreational activities. The handful of hardy stalwarts who explored behavioral family therapy, braced against the criticisms that they were dehumanizing patients and modifying behavior feebly and transiently, were buoyed by their early successes and remained afloat to see their efforts endorsed as part of the mainstream of clinical psychiatry and psychology (Liberman, 1978).
