Books
A short reading list, with one sentence on what each book is for.
B. F. Skinner · Free Press · 1953
Skinner's general statement, and the clearest case for the behavioural position.
Joseph Wolpe · Stanford University Press · 1958
Systematic desensitisation. The first behavioural therapy with an outcome record.
Albert Ellis · Citadel Press · 1962
Rational emotive behaviour therapy, and the first sustained cognitive challenge to analysis.
Aaron T. Beck · Penguin · 1976
The cognitive model stated whole, by a clinician who trained as an analyst.
Albert Bandura · Prentice Hall · 1977
Modelling and self-efficacy. The bridge between behaviourism and cognition.
Aaron T. Beck, A. John Rush, Brian F. Shaw, Gary Emery · Guilford Press · 1979
The manual that made CBT testable, and therefore fundable.
Marsha M. Linehan · Guilford Press · 1993
DBT. The first treatment to show results with a group most services had given up on.
Dennis Greenberger, Christine A. Padesky · Guilford Press · 1995
The client-facing CBT workbook, and the one most often handed across the room.
Steven C. Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, Kelly G. Wilson · Guilford Press · 1999
The third wave stated in full. Acceptance and values rather than disputation.
Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas, Don D. Jackson · W. W. Norton · 1967
One cannot not communicate. The Palo Alto group's founding statement.
Gregory Bateson · University of Chicago Press · 1972
The double bind, and the intellectual source of most systemic thinking.
Salvador Minuchin · Routledge · 1974
Structural family therapy, with transcripts that still teach better than most training films.
Murray Bowen · Jason Aronson · 1978
Differentiation of self and the multigenerational transmission process.
Judith L. Herman · Basic Books · 1992
Links private and political violence, and sets out the three stages of recovery.
Francine Shapiro · Guilford Press · 1995
EMDR from its originator. Included because the evidence base is now hard to ignore.
Peter A. Levine · North Atlantic Books · 1997
Somatic Experiencing, and the argument that trauma is held in the body's incomplete responses.
Bessel van der Kolk · Penguin · 2014
The book clients most often arrive holding. Contested in places and worth knowing well for that reason.
Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz · McGraw Hill · 1981
The standard textbook of neuroscience since 1981, and the reference behind most of what the other books here take for granted.
Allan N. Schore · Routledge · 1994
Attachment and right-hemisphere development brought together. Dense, and foundational.
Antonio Damasio · Vintage · 1994
The somatic marker hypothesis. Emotion as necessary to reason rather than opposed to it.