Shapiro was one of a number of gifted psychologists who emigrated to Britain from southern Africa before the second world war. After completing psychology degrees at Rhodes University, he went to Cambridge to study with Oliver Zangwill, who was to become professor of psychology.
At the outbreak of the war, Shapiro, who had joined the Communist party in the 1930s, volunteered for aircrew duties and was assigned as a navigator/bomb aimer, though he had hopeless spatial skills. He was shot down over the Netherlands in 1943 and severely injured an arm, leading to lifelong disability.
In the late 1940s, Shapiro joined the Institute of Psychiatry and Maudsley hospital, and, after Eysenck's appointment as head of the psychology department, he was invited to organise the clinical psychology training course and the provision of psychology services to the Bethlem and Maudsley hospitals. At that time, the nascent discipline of clinical psychology was confined largely to psychological testing, and the group of psychologists at the institute began work to apply scientific psychology to clinical problems. Early work included Eysenck's critical review, which undermined the contemporary claims for the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Shapiro's contributions were perhaps more subtle, but similarly long-lasting.
Convinced that psychological treatments should be based on scientific principles, Shapiro and his colleagues began to investigate the implications of Pavlov's psychology, and the work of other theorists, in a series of seminars. Members of the department also conducted experimental case analyses of clinical problems using the principles derived from theory.
The marriage of theory, and the application of experimental methods to single cases, was again apparent in Shapiro's second contribution to clinical psychology. From 1951 onwards, he published a series of papers applying an experimental method to diagnostic problems, which, in many ways, foreshadowed developments in the field of neuropsychology 25 years later.
Shapiro's third significant contribution came with the extension of single-case methods into problems where the subjective report of the patient, rather than performance on a cognitive test, was the focus of inquiry. He recognised the limitations in the available measures and devised a personal questionnaire method for scaling an individual's self-reported symptoms. The questionnaire cleverly exploited robust pair comparison methodology to provide rapid scoring and inherent reliability checks.
In the clinic, Shapiro was a man of infinite patience: tolerant, empathic and non-judgmental. To students, he was both encouraging and demanding. If an answer to a question was not apparent, one would be briefed to research the literature before the next clinical supervision. This then became the basis for an exhaustive inquiry into the validity of one's conclusions and the merits of the literature.
Shapiro left the Communist party in 1956 after Krushchev's denunciation of Stalin. He became dogmatically opposed to dogma and, at the institute, his opposition to the house line - crudely expressed as "behaviour therapy good, psychoanalysis bad" - was refreshing to many junior colleagues. He was nevertheless a man of strong convictions, which sometimes led to ruptures in working relationships and demanded tolerance from his family. He was also extraordinarily self-critical. He wrote slowly, constantly redrafting his papers, much to the chagrin of secretarial colleagues.
Shapiro was never awarded a professorship, although many believed he merited one. At a dinner to celebrate 25 years at the institute, colleagues presented him with a splendid leather chair in place of the academic position he never had.
He is survived by his wife, Jean, and their children, David and Rose.
Monte Bernard Shapiro, clinical psychologist, born May 31 1912; died April 29 2000
