Arnold Lazarus

Arnold Allan Lazarus (1932 to 2013) was a South African-born clinical psychologist who became a leading figure in the move from purely behavioral therapy toward cognitive behavioral therapy. After taking his doctorate at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1960 he taught at Stanford, Temple and Yale, and from 1972 until 1999 he was a distinguished professor at Rutgers University. He first worked alongside Joseph Wolpe, then parted from him by arguing that therapy should add other techniques to behavioral ones, and he is credited with coining the term behavior therapy. He is best known for multimodal therapy, introduced in his books of 1976 and 1981, which holds that a person has several modalities that must each be addressed, summed up by the acronym BASIC ID. He also wrote many self-help books on positive mental imagery.