Andrew Salter, a psychologist who helped develop the theoretical underpinnings and clinical applications of behavior therapy decades before the field became popular, died on Monday at his home in New York. He was 82.
The cause was cancer, said William Salter, his son.
Mr. Salter, recognized as a founder of behavior therapy, was one of the first to take the findings from experimental psychology on things such as conditioned reflexes and apply those principles to solving people’s problems.
He rejected psychoanalysis, with its years of probing into the roots of neuroses, arguing in the 1940s that a psychologist could help people who were overly anxious, shy or depressed much more quickly by teaching them to change their behavior.
Dr. Gerald Davison, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, wrote that Mr. Salter had been so far ahead of the behaviorist wave of the 1960s that many younger behavioral psychologists were unaware of his work.
He said Mr. Salter’s ideas “have become so widely accepted that he is often not formally cited when contemporary writers in behavior therapy refer to assertion training, expressiveness training, ‘getting in touch with one’s feelings,'” all early ideas of Mr. Salter that became popular later.
Davison made those comments in recommending that the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy present Mr. Salter with its lifetime achievement award, which it will do posthumously, on Nov. 23. He is the second psychologist to win the award.
Mr. Salter took an unconventional path to an unusual career. He was born in Waterbury, Conn., and graduated from New York University in 1937 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a burning interest in research, but no patience for postgraduate work. “I had no desire to spend the rest of my life studying the reactions of rats lost in labyrinths,” he once said.
Hypnosis had captured Mr. Salter’s interest in college, and he looked for ways to use it in clinical practice. He developed techniques for self-hypnosis but initially found it hard to publish his work because he did not have the necessary academic credentials. A psychologist at Yale University, Dr. Clark Leonard Hull, helped him publish an article in The Journal of General Psychology in 1941.
He came to national attention that year when Life magazine publicized his ideas about short-term psychotherapy. In 1944 he published his first book, What Is Hypnosis?
