Mary Cover Jones was often called "the mother of behavior therapy." She developed a technique called Desensitization which she used to cure phobias. Desensitization basically means to make less sensitive. So she made her patients less sensitive to their phobias. One way could be to repeatedly introduce a series of stimuli that were very similar but not the same as the phobia. She would treat patients with "direct conditioning" in which something pleasant that they enjoyed would be associated with their fear.
