Between science and psychoanalysis: Aaron T. Beck and the emergence of cognitive therapy

In the late 1960s a new form of psychotherapy, Cognitive Therapy, entered the psychotherapeutic arena. Aaron T. Beck, who developed cognitive therapy, was a psychoanalytic researcher who rejected the psychoanalytic model in favor of a new system that was brief, more pragmatic, and theoretically straightforward. By the mid-1970s Beck's cognitive therapy was spearheading a consortium of cognitive-behavior therapies that ushered in the new era of short-term psychotherapies, that has dominated the last two decades of twentieth century psychotherapy.

Many psychotherapists have praised Beck's system for its parsimony and practicality. Few psychotherapists realize, however, that he mounted cognitive therapy on a complicated theoretical stage and that he did not reject all of psychoanalytic theory. The aim of this dissertation is to illustrate and analyze historically the complexity of Beck's thought. The dissertation will examine Beck's career from his earliest psychiatric training through the publication of his seminal Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders (1976). Beck began his career following a program for revising psychoanalytic theory experimentally that his psychoanalytic mentors began in the late 1940s. Cognitive therapy, the product of his work, was unique among these revisionist approaches for its focus on cognition and for its strict adherence to the methodology of experimental science.

The emergence of cognitive therapy as a system completely separate from psychoanalysis speaks to the powerful effect of institutional politics on the dissemination of new psychotherapeutic knowledge. Psychoanalytic psychiatrists in the late 1960s forced a wedge between science and psychoanalysis that made it virtually impossible for Beck to find a community among psychoanalysts. Behavior therapists, in contrast, were experimental scientists with no obligation to psychoanalysis. Many behavior therapists with an interest in cognition helped him to establish cognitive therapy as a legitimate system of psychotherapy. The political grafting of cognitive therapy with behavior therapy, however, encouraged a communal forgetting of Beck's psychoanalytic ideas. This dissertation will evaluate both historically and theoretically the psychoanalytic features of cognitive therapy and argue for the value of looking with a new eye at the theoretical foundations of cognitive therapy.