Introduction to Series

There are many who have impacted the practice of psychiatric rehabilitation importantly. There are some who have done so monumentally. The former added incrementally to the body of knowledge, turning the ship of service ever so slightly in the process. There are others who defined the ship and current in which it sails. It is difficult to appreciate changes of this magnitude when they occur over a career and when they are recalled some 50 years later. Bob Liberman is one of these people; to understand how he earns these accolades, we need to appreciate how services for people with the most severe of mental illnesses have evolved over this time. When Liberman started his work in the ‘60s, illnesses like schizophrenia were understood wholly as diseases; not just diseases in the biological view (which Liberman and most modern practitioners acknowledge as essential), but also in the psychodynamic and psychoanalytic sense. Psychodynamic models at times represented people with mental illness as broken personalities, suffering deep psychic conflicts that could be healed only through intensive and esoteric interventions. Prognoses were typically gloomy and interventions custodial. Liberman’s insight was to borrow from the recently forming behavioral movement to better frame the vagaries of broken personality into more approachable, almost discrete targets for change. Liberman is one of the true granddads of behavior therapy, translating the mechanical ideas of B. F. Skinner into clinically meaningful and humane approaches. He did not do this just once. Very early in his career, Bob Liberman used behavioral analysis to decipher the challenges of mental illness into treatable disorders. He was early in work on reinforcement and token economies. He did the first and most important research on