COGNITIVE THERAPY

Cognitive Therapy (CT) was developed by psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck in the 1960s. Trained as a Freudian, he became disillusioned with psychodynamic approaches that took years to gain insight into unconscious emotions and drives. Based on his observation of depressed patients, Beck theorized that the key to therapy was how his clients perceived and interpreted and attributed meaning in their daily lives — a process known scientifically as cognition.

Beck developed a list of "errors" in thinking that he proposed could cause or maintain depression, including arbitrary inference, selective abstraction, over-generalization, and magnification (of negatives) and minimization (of positives). Clients who undertake cognitive therapy work to identify and change "distorted" or "unrealistic" ways of thinking, and therefore to influence emotion and behavior.

Beck later expanded his focus to include anxiety disorders and other disorders and problems. Treatment is based on collaboration between client and therapist and on testing beliefs.

Today cognitive therapy is the most researched psychotherapeutic approach of all. It is used extensively and successfully to treat Major Depression, Anxiety Disorders (including Phobias, Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder), as well as relationship difficulties, eating disorders, social phobia, bipolar disorder (with medication), obsessive compulsive disorder (with medication), personality disorders, and others. For more information, check out the Beck Institute.