Leigh McCullough
Leigh McCullough was an American psychotherapist, researcher, educator, and the pioneer of short-term dynamic psychotherapy. Her treatment model focused on the learned fears of experiencing certain emotions, or what she called affect phobias.
Early and personal life
McCullough was born Mary Lee Colson on June 5, 1945, in Kingsville, Texas. She was the daughter of James Melbourne Colson Jr. and his wife, Lena White Miller Colson. She had two siblings, James Melbourne Colson III and Douglas Steven Colson.On August 29, 1964, in Pass Christian, Mississippi, she married Robert Milton Hudspeth. She married George Vaillant on December 4, 1993, in Washington, Connecticut. It was her third marriage. Her fourth marriage in 2005 was to John Roosevelt Boettiger, grandson of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She had a daughter, Kelly McCullough, with her first husband, and a son, Scott Hudspeth, with her second. She also had four step-children through her fourth marriage: Adam, Sara, Joshua and Paul Boettiger.
About
Affect phobias is an exceptionally clear and useful reformulation of psychodynamic conflicts in behavioral terms. For example, in case of a psychodynamic conflict between anger and anxiety ; McCullough framed anger as an object that has learned to activate anxiety. Thus in McCullough's reformulation, anger and anxiety do not stand against each other, as in an interpersonal conflict, but rather: anger activates anxiety, which then activates some defence mechanisms to avoid or inhibit the activation of anger. In terms of Freud's Id, ego and super-ego, the Id activates the super-ego, which then activates the ego defences against the id.McCullough's reformulation of psychodynamic conflicts in terms of phobia both clarifies the therapeutic focus and suggests the intrapsychical change mechanism. Treatment of affect phobias progresses similarly to the exposure technique of behavioral therapies, with the difference that affects could be viewed as an internal phobia instead of external phobias such as fear of spiders or heights. Thus therapy should expose the patient to the activation of their anger, and the change mechanism is desensitization of anger activation.