Aaron T. Beck (1921-2021).

Memorializes Aaron T. Beck (1921-2021). Beck was the founder of cognitive therapy (CT), the father figure of the cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) movement, creator of the Beck Depression Inventory, champion of the manualized treatment protocol that kept psychotherapy in the game in the era of drugs and randomized clinical trials, and inspiration behind the U.K.'s National Health Service Improving Access to Psychological Therapies program. Beck trained in psychiatry at the height of the influence of psychoanalysis. Beck's psychiatric training was exclusively of the liberal-analytic bent. At Cushing Veterans Administration Hospital (Boston), he trained under Felix Deutsch and Jacob Finesinger, both of whom advocated brief psychoanalytically informed therapies. In 1994, he and his daughter Judith Beck founded the Beck Institute, a CBT training center. In his later years, he studied hatred (Prisoners of Hate) and schizophrenia. Beck garnered many honors including a public meeting with the Dalai Lama (2005) and the Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research (2006). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

History and the topsy-turvy world of psychotherapy.

This special issue talks about the history of psychotherapy. It was inspired by the events of a 3-day conference, "From Moral Treatments to Psychotherapeutics: Histories of Psychotherapy From the York Retreat to the Present Day". The conference was small and the ideas were exciting. It was clear that enthusiasm was high for exploring possibilities in something called "the history of psychotherapy". (PsycINFO Database Record

The "Splendid Isolation" of Aaron T. Beck.

Aaron T. Beck's Cognitive Therapy (CT) is a school of psychotherapy, conceived in the 1960s, that is celebrated by many clinicians for having provided the scientific antidote to all that was wrong with psychoanalysis. This essay situates the origins of CT in the crisis of legitimacy in psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s, when, among many charges, psycho- analysts had to face the accusation that analysis was not adequately scientific. Beck actually began his career as both a psychoanalyst and an experimentalist. Contrary to common triumphalist accounts, Beck created CT to be a neutral space, not a partisan one, in turbulent times. Other notable psychoanalysts also sought compromise, rather than partisanship, to bridge the transition to biomedical science. The biographical approach of this essay to the origins of Beck's CT both situates him historiographically and articulates the complex experiences of a generation of psychoanalysts otherwise opaque to standard narratives.

Aaron T. Beck's drawings and the psychoanalytic origin story of cognitive therapy.

In this essay the author challenges the standard origin story of cognitive therapy, namely, that its founder Aaron T. Beck broke with psychoanalysis to pursue a more pragmatic, parsimonious, and experimentalist cognitive model. It is true that Beck broke with psychoanalysis in large measure as a result of his experimental disconfirmation of key psychoanalytic ideas. His new school of cognitive therapy brought the experimental ethos into every corner of psychological life, extending outward into the largest multisite randomized controlled studies of psychotherapy ever attempted and inward into the deepest recesses of our private worlds. But newly discovered hand-sketched drawings from 1964 of the schema, a conceptual centerpiece of cognitive therapy, as well as unpublished personal correspondence show that Beck continued to think psychoanalytically even after he broke with psychoanalysis. The drawings urge us to consider an origin story much more complex than the one of inherited tradition. This new, multifaceted origin story of cognitive therapy reaches beyond sectarian disagreements and speaks to a broader understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of cognitive therapy.