Aaron Beck
Aaron Beck is a prominent figure in the field of cognitive therapy and is known for developing cognitive therapy, which focuses on identifying and changing negative thought patterns. He is also recognized for his work on depression, where he proposed the cognitive triad theory, suggesting that negative thoughts about the self, the world, and the future contribute to depression.
7 Key excerpts on "Aaron Beck"
eBook - ePubFoundations of Counseling and Psychotherapy
Evidence-Based Practices for a Diverse Society
- David Sue, Diane M. Sue(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
...Chapter 12 Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Depression The 2006 Lasker Award for Clinical Research was given to Aaron Beck “for the development of cognitive therapy, which has transformed the understanding and treatment of many psychiatric conditions, including depression, suicidal behavior, generalized anxiety, panic attacks, and eating disorders.” The National Academy of Sciences (1997) recognized Aaron Beck, stating “You have almost single-handedly restored the relevance of psychotherapy. Your cognitive therapy is the fastest growing form of psychotherapy and has influenced the treatment of psychiatric disorders throughout the world.” Aaron Beck was named in the American Psychologist (1989) as one of the five most influential psychotherapists of all time. (American Psychologist, 1989) A aron Beck is a psychiatrist and a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He has received numerous awards for his work in cognitive-behavioral therapy. He began his career first as a neurologist and then as a psychoanalyst, conducting research to validate psychodynamic formulations for depression. He was testing the proposition that depression was the result of anger turned inward, manifested in a “need to suffer.” However, his research did not support this hypothesis. He found that depressed individuals sought approval and acceptance from others and avoided behaviors that might lead to rejection. The conflict between the clinical hypothesis derived from psychoanalysis and his research findings forced an “agonizing reappraisal” of Beck’s belief system. This led Beck to search for an explanation regarding the reasons depressed individuals engage in self-criticism and have such a negative outlook on life (Beck et al., 1979)...
- (Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
...Beck, Aaron T. Lena C. Quilty University of Toronto Dr. Aaron T. Beck has profoundly shaped clinical research and practice, providing the theoretical framework and standardized tools and protocols crucial to current evidence‐based psychological assessment and treatment. Dr. Beck was a seminal figure in the development of cognitive theories of psychopathology and is widely regarded as the father of cognitive therapy. He notably authored a series of assessment instruments that remain some of the most widely used measures of affective symptomatology in both research and practice today. Dr. Beck founded and remains the President Emeritus of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research. He is further professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded the Psychopathology Research Unit. Dr. Beck is the Honorary President of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, and has received numerous awards, honors, and honorary degrees in recognition of his contributions to the field. He has published over 600 scholarly articles and 25 books; he was designated one of the five most influential psychologists of all time by The American Psychologist, and continues to be actively involved in theoretical and applied research. Dr. Beck was born in 1921 in Providence, Rhode Island. He received his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Brown University in 1942, and his medical degree from Yale University in 1946. He completed residencies in pathology and neurology, and subsequently acted as a fellow for two years, accruing experience in psychiatry and psychotherapy. Dr. Beck joined the University of Pennsylvania Department of Psychiatry in 1954, where his early research failed to demonstrate support for the psychoanalytic model of depression. Rather, Dr. Beck observed that depression was associated with reflexive thoughts such as self‐criticism and pessimism...
- Edward S. Neukrug(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...His research into the roles of beliefs and assumptions in psychiatric disturbances changed the way psychopathology is viewed. His change of the therapy relationship to one of collaboration made psychotherapy transparent and made the client an active participant in designing behavioral experiments to test beliefs. A goal of cognitive therapy is to teach the client to become his or her own therapist. In this way, Beck has influenced the self-help movement. Additionally, the demonstration of the effectiveness of cognitive therapy as a short-term therapy has had implications for health care policy. In terms of research, Beck developed classification systems for disorders, most notably suicidal behavior, as well as tests to assess the severity of symptoms of depression, anxiety, and other syndromes. He has employed rigorous tests of the effectiveness of cognitive therapy and is unique in studying clinical populations that were previously excluded from research studies because they carried dual diagnoses or were of high suicide risk. Such studies further demonstrate the robustness of cognitive therapy. Currently, cognitive therapy is practiced worldwide. The American Psychological Association reported cognitive therapy to be the leading psychotherapy practiced by clinical psychologists in the United States in 2012. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires psychiatry residency programs to train residents in cognitive-behavioral therapy. More than 100 empirical studies support the cognitive theoretical formulation of depression and other disorders. Beck himself has published more than 21 books and 540 articles. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In Europe, some health systems recommend the use of cognitive therapy in treating a number of disorders...
eBook - ePubBeck's Cognitive Therapy
Distinctive Features 2nd Edition
- Frank Wills(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Introduction From Kraepelin to Beck to us I began my career in mental health in 1971 – some 50 years after the birth of Aaron Beck. I can remember the forbidding atmosphere that still pervaded psychiatric hospitals in those days. I soon, however, became aware of more interesting ideas for helping patients than incarcerating them – first, mostly from the behavioural and psychodynamic perspectives. Though I found their ideas engaging, there was for me something fundamentally lacking in both of them. Then, a little later, I heard about cognitive approaches – first, George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory and then, Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT). In 1982, I attended a course in which Beck’s work was discussed and I thought that it sounded very interesting – a little later, I saw Cognitive Therapy of Depression in the library of a college where I was teaching. Reading it in a library alcove and totally absorbed, I missed the library’s closing bell and was nearly locked in for the night. It took another ten years before I had the privilege of joining the second cohort to be trained in Beck’s cognitive therapy at the Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre. I was supervised by Melanie Fennell, Ann Hackman, and Adrian Wells, and taught by, among others, David. M. Clark and Paul Salkovskis, all subsequently influential figures in the cognitive therapy field. For me, training in cognitive therapy was a transformative experience, both professionally and personally. This book distils the experience of the subsequent 30 years of implementing cognitive therapy in practice. I have walked the Beckian Way – with all its satisfactions and all its challenges. Beck also was shocked by the conditions in the psychiatric hospitals that he first encountered. His first departmental chairman followed the ideas of Kraepelin – a major figure of pre-Second World War psychiatry – who believed that there were just two disorders, neither of which could be treated...
- Graham C.L. Davey, Graham C.L. Davey(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...3 The Origins of Cognitive Therapy: Building on Beck (1964) Beck, A.T. (1964) Thinking and depression: II. Theory and therapy, Archives of General Psychiatry, 10 : 561–1 Adrian Whittington Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust In the above paper Aaron T. Beck, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, set out a ground-breaking theory connecting thinking and depression. Beck proposed a theoretical framework for understanding phenomena that he had observed with depressed patients in his consulting room, phenomena which he had described in a companion paper published the previous year (Beck, 1963). He had noticed that his depressed patients appeared to have patterns of thinking that were systematically more negative, exaggerated, over-generalised and self-critical compared to non-depressed patients. He concluded that this pattern of thinking was ‘distorted’ and did not reflect the full picture of his patients’ lives. In the 1964 paper Beck set out a theoretical framework for understanding these observed patterns of thinking, proposing that cognitive structures in the form of schemas are activated during depression. These schemas, previously proposed by Piaget (1936), were defined as relatively stable and enduring mental structures by which people screen, code and evaluate the stimuli making up their experience. In depression Beck proposed that the activation of idiosyncratic schemas related to negative themes such as failure or being unwanted or abandoned explain the predominance of negative thinking during depression. He also set out the implications of the schema theory for psychotherapy; that actively reviewing, evaluating and amending these meaning structures should be the work of therapy. Beck’s paper appeared at about the same time as others (e.g. Ellis, 1962) were also developing approaches to psychotherapy based in cognition and behaviour rather than the postulated unconscious processes of the traditional psychoanalytic paradigm of the time...
eBook - ePubUnderstanding Forgiveness and Addiction
Theory, Research, and Clinical Application
- Jon R. Webb(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...And, if I absolutely expect or demand these things not to happen, when they do, I likely will feel, behave, cope, and problem-solve in a much different way than if I could back away from absolutely demanding/expecting such to happen (see the ABC Model, above). This does not mean that we cannot have preferences (or even strong preferences), but preferences are not absolutistic in that a preference recognizes that things may or may not happen. Cognitive Behavior Therapy Originally known as cognitive therapy, Aaron Beck’s system of psychotherapy is now commonly called Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), and four of its most essential principles (again, those that distinguish it from other non-cognitive systems of psychotherapy) consist of (1) the cognitive triad, (2) the source of cognitive dysfunction, (3) the relationship between core beliefs, intermediate beliefs, and automatic thoughts, and (4) the issue of cognitive errors (see Beck, 2011). The cognitive triad is in reference to the human tendency to become focused on beliefs and perceptions about themselves (including sense of self, experiences, and the future), others, and the world (Beck et al., 1979 ; Beck, 2011). Whether these beliefs and perceptions become problematic or not tends to be related to their qualitative nature. When our beliefs and perceptions in this regard are largely positive, judiciously favorable, and optimistic we tend to be adaptive and able to cope and problem-solve effectively. When said beliefs and perceptions are largely negative, critical, or pessimistic we tend to have difficulty adapting to novel circumstances and thus develop problems with coping and problem solving. Regarding the source of cognitive dysfunction, our perceptions of situations influence how we feel, rather than the situation itself...
- Sonu Shamdasani, Del Loewenthal, Sonu Shamdasani, Del Loewenthal(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...But neither this manual nor those first-generation manuals which succeeded it were designed for clinical trials. Neither did they describe nor delineate the techniques of a therapy in its entirety. 2 They had a more focal purpose. Our story begins in the next phase, the 1970s, when Aaron Beck repurposed the idea of a manual. Revolutionary virtues attended upon his manual that did not inhere in first-generation ones. Beck’s manual for CTOD Aaron Beck began his career at Penn in the mid-1950s as a psychoanalyst. He specialized in the treatment of depression and conducted psychoanalytic research. As his research progressed, Beck suspected that depression might be a thought disorder – not as severe as schizophrenia but nonetheless evidencing distortions in thought – rather than a mood disorder. Following several professional crises in the early 1960s, he turned his back on organized psychoanalysis. He took a five-year sabbatical (1962–1967) to pursue new ideas about cognitions in depression (Beck, 1967; Rosner, 2012, 2014). He published the two foundational articles on thinking and depression (Beck, 1963, 1964) and his first book (Beck, 1967) during this period of ‘splendid isolation’. This was the period in which cognitive therapy was born. Beck’s frustration with psychoanalysis lay in its culture of dogmatism and loyalty. The professional crises he experienced in the early 1960s were the by-product of a postwar psychoanalytic establishment that held too much power and abused that power with apparent abandon (see Hale, 1995) 3. The analysts in Beck’s orbit who sat in positions of power preached that psychoanalytic theory (especially the unconscious) was inviolable, experimental data were viable only if they supported the theory (and should be thrown out, if not), and skepticism and critique were to be curtailed (with strong-arm tactics, if necessary). Secrecy, not accountability, held sway...
