Have you ever felt an extreme fear of something? If you haven’t then the chances are you will because eventually, everyone in their lifetime faces some apprehension, but some people faces intense irrational fear. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 18% of the US population has confronted some type of anxiety (Wells, 2005). Anxiety disorders include specific phobias, panic disorders, and generalized anxiety disorders. There are many similarities between phobias and fears, but the main difference between fears and phobias are that phobias are an extreme fear that could possibly disrupt your everyday life. One of the therapies to treat phobias is called systemic desensitization. The founder of this therapy is Joseph Wolpe. According to Wolpe (1961), the main reason of having a phobia is that one must have witnessed a frightening event which became a part of their memory with an intense fear. Wolpe conducted an experiment in 1961 on specific phobias in which he introduced the thought of systematic desensitization. Systematic desensitization is a technique in which a patient is exposed to objects that cause anxiety and the purpose of this technique was to see whether it would decerease the phobia on patients or not. In preparation for the experiment, Joseph Wolpe…show more content… Out of 68 phobias, 91% were judged to be completely successful. There were critics on Wolpe’s experiment where Freudians, the psychoanalytic camp critiques Wolpe’s experiment, claiming that it only treated the symptoms, but not the causes of the phobias. They also believed that new symptoms will replace the old symptoms. Wolpe answered to all the critics by conducting various experiments where he used systematic desensitization to see if the patients will develop new symptoms by replacing the old ones. Out of 25 out 35 patients who successfully received the systematic desensitization claimed that there was no relapse or new phobia (Wolpe,
