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Two groups of Ss received systematic desensitization for “snakephobia.” 9 Ss were led to expect anxiety reduction from desensitization; another 9 were not. Changes in snake-avoidance for these two groups were compared with changes displayed by 9 Ss who received no treatment.

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underrate the accomplishments of Wolpe. What Wolpe (1958) did was to take the domain of discourse of Pavlov and augment it to encompass disordered human behavior, to take seriously (not metaphorically, at all) the notion that animal neurosis is neurosis. Through change in the predicate base or a kind of paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1970), Wolpe was able to see a phobia as a conditioned response. A prerequisite for this was an admitted disenchantment with the Freudian paradigm.To see the danger in London's recommendations, it is necessary to translate what he said. What he wanted us to do was to restrict our investigations to "problems" (psychological disorders) within a functional analytic framework, and to ignore any broader theorizing that might attempt to incorporate such theories into a larger theory of behavior. Such a restriction would prevent us from seeing any anomalies (to borrow Kuhn's 1970 concept) in the conceptual framework proposed by London; this, in turn, would prevent the development of new techniques not already provided for within the initial framework. We believe that any really new technique will only arise from an expansion or alteration of our domain of discourse, the predicate base, or the analytic properties of the predicate base.

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