The origins of CBT: giving Freud the slip
‘Turning on the intercom…’: this is how Aaron Temkin Beck described the breakthrough responsible for the evolution of CBT. In the 1960s Beck was an established (if rather frustrated) psychiatrist attempting to treat his patients using Freudian psychoanalysis. While Freud’s methods emphasised the importance of unpacking repressed conflicts from the past, Beck became convinced that for many of his patients the crux of their problems lay more in what they were telling themselves in the present.
He took up this line of inquiry when one of his patients admitted a number of anxious thoughts about how the consultation with Beck was going. The patient noticed several thoughts of the following kind running through ...
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