Ralph Franklin Hefferline: The Gestalt Therapist among the Skinnerians or the Skinnerian among the Gestalt Therapists?

Abstract

Ralph Franklin Hefferline, who was an operant psychologist, co‐authored Gestalt Therapy with Frederick S. Perls and Paul Goodman. Hefferline's contributions to the development of biofeedback and conditioning without awareness are reviewed, and the influence of B. F. Skinner's analysis of private events on Gestalt Therapy is argued.

Contemporary Gestalt Psychotherapy: The Tensions Between Practitioner Education and the Current Cultural Context

“…Gestalt therapy originated in the 1950s after two significant events: the publication of the seminal text Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality by Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline, and Paul Goodman (1951/1994), and the opening of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy (NYIGT) in 1952. This seminal text is known within the gestalt community as "PHG", with F. Perls and Goodman acknowledged as contributing to the theoretical sections while Hefferline authored the chapters containing practical exercises (Knapp, 1986). The word "gestalt", which has no direct English translation, has been defined as a "whole, configuration, integration, a unique patterning" (Smith, 1976, p. 3).…”

The Hefferline Notes: B. F. Skinner’s First Public Exposition of His Analysis of Verbal Behavior

“…Thus, Hefferline's career at Columbia was diverse and complex. It illustrated an integration of experimental analysis and clinical problems, advances in fundamental methods, and was all undertaken with a foundation in Skinner's understanding of verbal behavior (Knapp, 1986).…”

Humanistic psychology and contextual behavioral perspectives.

“…The founder of the journal Behaviorism , Willard Day, overtly sought reconciliation between radical behaviorism and phenomenology (Day, 1969). Most present day Gestalt therapists would find it incomprehensible that the coauthor who contributed the extensive personal and applied exercises (see Perls introduction, p. viii) to the original book on Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951) was Ralph Hefferline, an experimental psychology faculty member at Columbia and a rat running radical behaviorist in the Skinnerian tradition (Knapp, 1986). For reasons that are easy to understand today, Hefferline objected to the label “Gestalt,” preferring the term “Integrative Therapy” (Shepard, 1975, p. 63), but integration was not the order of the day and the two traditions stood far apart for decades.…”