O’Donohue, W., & Masuda, A. (Eds.), (in press). Behavior Therapy: First, Second, and Third Waves. New York: Springer. 9-24-20 11-1-20 Personal Perspectives on the Development of Behavior Therapy and Cognitive Behavior Therapy Gerald C. Davison Department of Psychology University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-1061
[email protected] In June 1999 I was privileged to be invited to a two-day conference at the University of Nevada, Reno to participate in presentations by colleagues regarded by the organizing committee (William T. O’Donohue, Deborah A. Henderson, Steven C. Hayes, Jane E. Fisher, and Linda J. Hayes) to be founders of behavior therapy. Most of the other speakers and those, having passed, their surrogates, were people whose seminal writings I had learned from as a graduate student and as a young researcher, teacher, and practitioner. The task set for each of us was to describe what we saw as the strongest influences in our professional lives and to discuss a publication that we believed had had some importance in the development of (cognitive) behavior therapy. We were also encouraged to engage in something which occasionally happens only in personal settings with friends and perhaps also with colleagues and students, namely autobiographical material that each of us believed had had bearing on our intellectual and professional development. The assumption of the conference organizers was that this framework would provide a context for a deeper understanding of the field than is available in published materials and, if one is lucky, from direct and extended contacts with a small handful of senior colleagues.