Andrew Salter (May 9, 1914 – October 7, 1996) was an American clinical psychologist who introduced behavior therapy, developed many of its conceptual foundations, and created numerous techniques still used today across its varied descendants, including cognitive behavioral therapy. His work in the early 1940s demystified hypnosis, interpreting it as a form of conditioning, now the widely accepted view. He was one of the founders of the Association for the Advancement of Behavioral Therapies, now the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. He maintained an active clinical practice in Manhattan until shortly before his death. His key ideas are documented in his book, Conditioned Reflex Therapy, (hereafter CRT), originally published in 1949 and reprinted many times, with a new edition published by Watkins Press in 2019. All citations from CRT refer to this edition.
Family life Salter's parents were Russian Jews. His father, Morris, was a Social Democrat, sent into internal exile to the same penal village as Trotsky’s first wife,Saltzman, Morris (1948) Unpublished memoir after which the family emigrated to the U.S. after the 1905 Revolution. In the U.S., Morris worked as a watchmaker in the factories of Waterbury, Connecticut, where Andrew was born on May 9, 1914. After his union organizing got Morris blacklisted, the family moved to the Bronx where Morris opened a small watch repair shop. Salter's mother, Fanny was a homemaker. Andrew had a brother who died before he was born and a younger sister, Bertha, who died in 2001.
In 1943, Salter married Rhoda Kazan, who had a B.A. from Queens College and an M.A. in sociology from the University of Minnesota. She managed the clinical practice, handled his finances, and was an essential contributor to his success. They had two sons: William, born in 1947, and Robert, born in 1952.
Salter lived in Manhattan for fifty years and very much enjoyed its museums, theaters, movies and music. He had many friends who were active in the arts, especially writers. On a deeper level, he believed it was an individual's responsibility to help others when possible, and so his colleagues—and even some of his professional antagonists—came to him when they or their family members needed help, because they appreciated his therapeutic insights and deep commitment to his work. As Gerald Davison wrote, "Those of us who knew Salter personally appreciated his sheer brilliance, his wit, his warmth, decency and consideration for others, his supportiveness, his keen intuitive grasp of human nature, his infectious zest for life, his love of art and literature, and his devotion to family and friends." (p. 32)
Salter always gave great credit to his wife, Rhoda, for her help, intelligence and insight. Indeed, he took pride in the fact that quite a few of his patients came to sessions early so they could get “free time” with his wife before their official session began. (CRT, p. 260)
Verbally quick, he loved puns, vivid expressions, clever turns of phrase and especially jokes. His office became an informal joke exchange, and some patients strived to bring a new joke to each session, confident that they would be rewarded by new ones to take away. Occasionally, a patient reported that they had told a joke at a party and was then approached by a stranger who asked if they were seeing Andrew Salter. (CRT, p. 246)Salter, A. (2019). Conditioned Reflex Therapy. London, England: Watkins
Early life and education Salter's intellectual gifts were recognized in elementary school: researchers from the Gesell Institute at Yale interviewed and tested him repeatedly as a child, and his parents fostered his intellectual interests. The family moved from Waterbury to New York City when Andrew was fourteen, first living in two rooms behind his father's store, then moving to an apartment. (CRT, p. 238)
As a boy he was fascinated by magic tricks and cryptography and frequented a magic shop in Manhattan, listening to older magicians and learning tricks. He was fascinated by the ways in which they manipulated attention in their work. He wrote a (paid) weekly column on codes and cryptography for the New York World in his early teens. His interest in conditioning arose in part from these youthful observations of the ways magicians manipulated attention and suggestion to achieve some of their effects.(CRT, p. 238)
Salter graduated from Morris High school in the Bronx, New York, and entered the uptown campus of NYU in 1931, majoring in physics. He found physics unsatisfying and dropped out of college for two years to spend most of his time at the New York Public Library. He read deeply in hypnosis and psychology, preferring Pavlov, Bekhterev, and the Russians to Freud and his followers.(CRT, p. 238)
He read widely about yogis and mystics, about popular ideas on hypnosis through the years, and about the mastery of suggestibility practiced by the stage and parlor magicians he had encountered as an adolescent. In his time out of college during the height of the Great Depression, he also spent time as a union organizer and enjoyed debating Communists on the street corners of the Bronx from his youthful perspective as a Socialist. (He retained his dislike of Communism as he grew older, though not his beliefs as a democratic socialist.) (CRT, p. 238)
Upon returning to NYU he switched his major to psychology and graduated in 1937 with a B.S., ending his formal involvement with an academic institution.
Professional career Salter was determined to do something important in psychology building on learning theory and behaviorist psychology, but “had no desire to spend the rest of my life studying the reactions of rats lost in labyrinths”.(Wickware, 1941, p. 86) With only his B.S. from NYU, he started his clinical practice in Manhattan in 1941—which he continued for 55 years until a few months before his death in 1996.
He had been interested in hypnosis for years. (CRT, p. 239) He became convinced that hypnosis was deeply linked with the phenomena of conditioning being investigated in laboratory animals by the behaviorists of that era, and began to use hypnosis with stutterers, nail-biters, and some phobics. Within a few years he had developed his ideas sufficiently to write the article Three Techniques of Autohypnosis, eventually accepted by Clark Hull for the Journal of General Psychology after he “Americanized” his name from Saltzman. This article clarified the concept of self-hypnosis, introduced the idea of using it in therapy, and presented three practical methods for self-hypnosis.
This brief article in a professional journal by an unknown 27-year-old was discussed approvingly in the New York Times,Kaempffert, W. (1941, June 8). Hypnotizing Yourself. New York Times, D5. Time magazine, and in an extensive article in Life magazine, after which he always had a waiting list. The Time article was titled “Everyman His Own Svengali,” complete with a photograph of Salter.Time, (1941, June 2). Everyman His Own Svengali, p. 40. The publicity from major publications, and Salter's own diligent work, helped him develop a clinical practiced that thrived from the time he moved his office from the Waldorf Astoria to 1000 Park Avenue in 1943 until he stopped seeing patients shortly before he died in 1996.
By 1944 he had expanded his ideas on hypnosis into a small volume titled What Is Hypnosis, which also vigorously attacked the dominant Freudian thinking of the day as unscientific and useless to patients. This little book (less than 100 pages) made a strong impact, with reviews pro and con in specialist and general interest publications. The book remained in print for thirty years and was eventually used in many college psychology courses. Its most important feature was Salter's strong argument that hypnosis was a form of verbal conditioning. This early work can be seen as a major step toward cognitive behavior therapy, since it fundamentally involves patients telling themselves things to change how they feel. (CRT, p. 241)
He treated hundreds of patients, honing his methods for brief therapy and constructing an overarching intellectual framework based firmly on the Pavlovian paradigm. As his clinical experience accumulated, his techniques expanded beyond hypnosis to conditioning more broadly, specifically conditioning focused on making people more “excitatory” and less “inhibitory,” ideas explicitly credited to Pavlov when he documented them later in his most important book, Conditioned Reflex Therapy in 1949. When the book was published, Freud had died just a few years before, Joseph Wolpe was still conducting his early research in South Africa, and psychoanalysis was the dominant approach to treating psychological issues. “The American century” was well underway—World War II had just ended, the power of modern science had been demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the U.S. economy had doubled in size since 1939. Salter's most important work was very much an example of the optimism of his time.
Conditioned Reflex Therapy is largely composed of chapters of case studies, each beginning with explanatory prose documenting Salter's approach to the problems the cases illustrate—shyness, the addictions, problems of the creative, and the like. It introduced many of the key techniques that have become standard in modern psychotherapy: brief therapy; the use of relaxation, imagery, and self-talk to achieve behavior modification, training in assertiveness—an essential application of his key Pavlovian idea of “excitation”—and the use of “homework” in which the patient applies the lessons of therapy to the real world. See below, Professional Contributions.
Like virtually all of Salter's writings, Conditioned Reflex Therapy made its case in clear, lively prose that is still enjoyable today. Salter was extremely proud of the fact that his writing was praised by some of the authors he admired most including Aldous Huxley, Vladimir Nabokov and H.G. Wells.Davison, G. (1996). Andrew Salter APS Observer, 9(6), 30-31.
In 1952 Salter published The Case Against Psychoanalysis, in which he explained why, as he had stated earlier in Conditioned Reflex Therapy, “It is high time that psychoanalysis, like the elephant of fable, dragged itself off to some distant jungle graveyard and died. Psychoanalysis has outlived its usefulness. Its methods are vague, its treatment is long drawn out and more often than not, its results are insipid and unimpressive. (CRT, p7.) The book combined methodological critiques, a review of therapy outcome studies, and what might be called common-sense arguments, as Salter and many others saw them. Since psychoanalysis was by far the dominant method of psychotherapy in the U.S. at the time, the book was quite controversial; as an example, the New York Times published a review by Rollo May that was quite dismissive.May, Rollo in New York Times April 4, 1952