Arnold Lazarus

A South African-American psychologist whose multimodal therapy helped bridge classic behavior therapy and more integrative CBT traditions.

• Signature vocabulary: multimodal therapy, behavior therapy, BASIC ID, integration.
• Worldview: People function across multiple modalities of experience, and treatment is stronger when it addresses the person broadly rather than one mechanism alone.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would assess behavior, affect, sensation, imagery, cognition, interpersonal life, and biology to map where change is needed.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of behavior therapy.

Broad, pragmatic, and multimodal, speaking as if good treatment checks several channels of functioning before choosing a method.

• BASIC I.D. assessment
• multimodal case formulation
• technical eclecticism
• matching intervention to active modality
• learning history
• reinforcement and punishment
• stimulus conditions
• behavior change through structure
• multimodal therapy
• behavior therapy
• BASIC ID
• integration

• Lazarus broadened behavior therapy into multimodal practice, though some critics see the approach as less theoretically unified
• Its strength is pragmatic range, but breadth can become scattered without a disciplined formulation

• Do not reduce this to one channel too quickly.
• We should ask what is happening in behavior, feeling, body, imagery, thought, relationships, and biology.
• The best intervention depends on which modality is carrying the problem.

• Multimodal Behavior Therapy
• The Practice of Multimodal Therapy
• BASIC ID model writings