Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders
The cognitive model stated whole, by a clinician who trained as an analyst.
The specific content of the interpretation of an event leads to a specific emotional response.
Beck sets out the cognitive model of emotional disturbance and the therapy built on it. Trained first as a psychoanalyst, he turns attention from unconscious drives to the interpretations a patient makes moment by moment, arguing that anxiety, depression, obsessions, phobias, and psychosomatic complaints each follow from a characteristic way of reading events. He names the automatic thoughts that run beneath a patient's reported feeling, and the recurring distortions that shape them: arbitrary inference, selective abstraction, overgeneralization, magnification.
In the consulting room the book offers a practical discipline. It asks the clinician to draw out the specific thought attached to a shift in mood, to treat that thought as a hypothesis rather than a fact, and to weigh it against what the patient actually observes. Beck writes as someone who has sat with the analytic account and found it wanting for these disorders, so his case for a cognitive reading stays close to clinical material rather than abstraction.
About the author
Aaron Temkin Beck
Aaron T. Beck (1921 to 2021) was an American psychiatrist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, widely regarded as the founder of cognitive therapy, the approach now known as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). He first trained as a psychoanalyst at the Philadelphia Institute before his clinical work with depressed patients led him toward a present-focused method built around observable thoughts. He also created the Beck Depression Inventory, a standard measure of symptom severity still used across clinical practice.
Details
- 1976
- English
- Penguin
- Penguin, 1976
- 368
- 9780140156898