Dr. Aaron Beck's Transition from Psychoanalysis to Cognitive Theory

During a recent Beck Institute Workshop, Dr. Aaron Beck describes how he transitioned from psychoanalysis to cognitive theory. Dr. Beck explains that his transition period spanned two years and began when he discovered a lack of empirical evidence supporting psychoanalytic theory of depression. He subsequently began to question the effectiveness of psychoanalysis in the treatment of depression. In 1963, Dr. Beck published "Thinking and Depression: Idiosyncratic Content and Cognitive Distortions" in the Archives of General Psychiatry, widely recognized as his first publication on Cognitive Therapy.

[beckinstitute]

Dr. Aaron Beck discusses his transition from psychoanalysis to Cognitive Therapy.

[GiselahJour]

Grata por esta importante e histórica notícia!

[GregoryWonderwheel]

This man is largely to blame for the devolution of psychology and the scientism of materialistic psychology now with two wings called neuropsychology and cognitive behavioral psychology. His problem was that he was trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst and not a Jungian analytical psychologist whose work was based on empirical observation. The focus on retraining thinking patterns is far superior and true to psychology than that of neuropsychology, however it remains at the thinking level of the ego-identity and does not touch the unconscious directly. So to a certain extent, the retraining of the thinking ego is a good thing, it is only another variation of the Freudian approach of making people into good cogs in the social machine with being "happy" as the goal.