One of the most influential psychologists and psychotherapists of the 20th century, the American Dr. Aaron Beck, “father” of cognitive-behavioral therapy, which was the awe-inspiring rival to Freudian psychoanalysis, died at the age of 100 at his home in Philadelphia.
His work has revolutionized the diagnosis and treatment of depression, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, bulimia, substance abuse, insomnia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other mental disorders, and continues to influence today. His death was announced by the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which he co-founded with his daughter Dr. Judith Beck, according to the New York Times and The Guardian.
As Beck said, “My father was an amazing man who dedicated his life to helping others, continuing to work until his death. He inspired students, doctors and researchers for several generations with his passion and pioneering work.” .
As a young psychiatrist (previously trained in Freudian psychoanalysis), Beck developed the field of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s, forcing patients to focus on the distortions of their everyday thinking. despite the repulsed conflicts of their childhood, as did Freudian psychoanalysts. The cognitive therapist has since attempted to change the patient’s self-limiting internal monologue, based on the anti-Freudian saying “there is much more on the surface than what the eye sees”.
Beck discovered experimentally that it is possible to improve patients’ mental health if they recognize the wrong automated patterns of thinking (such as “I am always a complete failure in what I do” or “I do not like anyone”) and now think with more logical and positive way, thus reducing their anxiety or fear. e.g. for others around them. Among other things, he argued that depression was not caused by a repressed masochism, as Freud believed, but mainly by low self-esteem and constant self-criticism.
Beck’s work, along with that of another influential psychologist, Albert Ellis, who worked independently, eventually formed the backbone of cognitive-behavioral therapy. It was a pragmatic approach focused on the present rather than the past, which aroused skepticism especially among the psychotherapists of the Freud and Jung tradition, who took for granted the need to “dig” into the patient’s deep subconscious or even the unconscious. Beck’s treatment as superficial and ineffective.
But Beck and his students presented data that showed that the new treatment was bringing results, so in the process their method gained ground and became established in psychiatry and psychology. Beck initially founded his own scientific journal, Cognitive Therapy and Research, to present his studies, but gradually the new therapy became more widely accepted internationally as more scientific than psychoanalysis, if nothing else because it seemed to have faster and more measurable results.
According to Vanderbilt University psychologist Steven Holon, “Dr. Beck took a hundred years of dogma, found that it did not stand still, and invented something short but lasting and effective, essentially saving psychotherapy from itself.”
Beck, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the United States, was a graduate of Brown University in Rhode Island and later studied medicine at Yale. He was influenced, among others, by the German-American psychoanalyst Karen Horney and the psychologist Albert Ellis. He wrote alone or together with 22 other books and more than 500 scientific articles, while he was honored with many medical awards (Albert Lasker, Heinz, Sarnat etc.). The American Psychologist magazine named him one of the ten most influential psychotherapists ever.
Indicative of his open-mindedness was that in the 2000s he had many public and private discussions with the Dalai Lama, concluding that cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy and Buddhism have much in common, especially in the way they prioritize the need to change minds. through self-observation.
Beck leaves behind his wife of more than 70 years, Phyllis Beck, a former senior judge, four children, ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.
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