Len
Horowitz, my friend and fellow psychotherapy researcher died on 11 November
2019, at the age of 82, in Portola Valley, California. However, my fellow
psychotherapy researchers and I didn’t hear about his death until a few days
ago, when George Silberschatz sent out an email on the Society for
Psychotherapy Research (SPR) list.
Personal reflections. I met Len
in 1976 when as a very green grad student I attended my very first SPR conference,
in San Diego. I have this vivid memory
of hanging around with him talking by some large plants in the entryway of the
Hotel del Coronado. The conference was over but I delayed leaving because I
fell into long and fascinating conversation with him about how the
Spearman-Brown prophecy formula could be used to increase the reliability of
therapy process ratings. It seemed like
magic at the time and impressed the heck out of me. From then on he was, to quote T.S. Eliot il miglior fabbro, “the better maker”:
the psychotherapy research methodologist who I, as a psychotherapy research methodologist,
looked to for inspiration. Without him
it would have been years before I discovered Spearman-Brown, and it would never
have occurred to me to use to cluster analysis/multidimensional scaling for my
1985 significant events taxonomy paper.
Like many of my colleagues in SPR I was an early adopter of his
wonderful Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP), the items for which he
constructed from transcripts of intake sessions with psychotherapy clients, a lovely
example of phenomenological test construction.
His case study research on the emergence of previously warded-off mental
contents, with the Mount Zion Group in San Francisco, was a revelation for me
when I first read it. And so on.
Here are a few facts about Len: Len was
born 28 Feb 1937. He received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from Johns
Hopkins University in 1960. He started
out in Experimental Psychology, landed a job at Stanford University right out
of grad school at the age of 23 (no mean feat that, even in those days), and
then later did clinical training, working with the Mount Zion Group during the
1970’s, as I mentioned above. He was
president of SPR 1992-93 and president of the Society for
Interpersonal Theory and Research (which he helped found) 1999-2000. He received SPR’s Distinguished Career Award in
2010. He wrote at least two books,
including an undergrad statistics textbook (Elements
of Statistics for Psychology & Education,1974), and Interpersonal
Foundations of Psychopathology (2004).
He is also famous for his work with Hans Strupp and Michael Lambert on a
1990’s APA task force on creating a core battery of standardized measures for evaluating
the outcome of psychotherapy (published as Measuring Patient Changes in
Mood, Anxiety, and Personality Disorders: Toward a Core Battery, 1997) and
for editing (with Stephen Strack), the Handbook
of Interpersonal Psychology: Theory, Research, Assessment, and Therapeutic
Interventions (2010). According the
Scopus, his most frequently-cited publication (Bartholomew & Horowitz,
1991) has been cited 3758 times; it is one of the key publications in the
modern attachment theory literature.
Since word
of his death reached the SPR list, there has been an amazing outpouring from a
wide range of well-known psychotherapy researchers honouring his many
contributions. What I have found most
striking about these testimonials, however, is the portrait of Len that emerges
from them: Over and over again, people have written about how Len made them
feel welcome from their first SPR conference, how he was gentle, approachable,
humble, enthusiastic, generous, warm, creative, throughtful and
thought-provoking, wise, inspiring… and brilliant. He clearly felt a calling to
support early career psychotherapy researchers and in this has provided a great
service to the field and an important role model for the rest of us. I think Les
Greenberg summed Len up about right when he described him as an “all round
mensch”.
And here is a collection of some
of my favourite Len Horowitz references (others will have other suggestions):
Horowitz, L.M., Sampson, H., Siegelman, E.Y., Wolfson,
A., & Weiss, J. (1975). On the
identification of warded off mental contents.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 84,
545-558.
Horowitz, L.M. (1979).
On the cognitive structure of interpersonal problems treated in
psychotherapy. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 47, 5-15.
Horowitz, L.M., Inouye, D., & Siegelman, E.Y.
(1979). On averaging judges' ratings to
increase their correlation with an external criterion. Journal
of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 47, 453-458.
Horowitz, L.M., Rosenberg, S.E., Baer, B.A., Ureño, G.,
Villaseñor, V.S. (1988). Inventory of interpersonal problems: psychometric
properties and clinical applications. Journal of Consulting and Clinical
Psychology, 56, 885-892.
Horowitz, L.M., Rosenberg, S.E., Ureño, G., Kalehzan,
B.M., & O'Halloran, P. (1989).
Psychodynamic formulation, consensual response method, and interpersonal
problems. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 57, 599-606.
Bartholomew,
K., & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test
of a four-category model. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 226-244.
Horowitz, L. M., & Malle, B.F.
(1993). Fuzzy concepts in psychotherapy
research. Psychotherapy Research, 3, 131-148.
I think that an excellent way to honor Len's memory would be to go back an look at some of these wonderful papers. Just a couple of weeks ago, as part of reviewing an article submitted for publication, I was pleased to be able to recommend the 1975 study to an author. Len was truly one of a kind and certainly a major inspiration for me over the course my career as a psychotherapy researcher.
