Cognitive Behavior

5 Pages 1343 Words

Where did Cognitive Behavior Therapy come from?
Cognitive behavior therapy was devised in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Albert Ellis, Ph.D. in New York and by Aaron Beck, M.D. in Philadelphia. Although they worked independently of each other, both Ellis and Beck had grown dissatisfied with the traditional psychoanalytic (Freudian) therapies that they thought were ineffective. They both trained with Freud. Both Ellis and Beck believed that peoples’ conscious beliefs and thought processes were very important in understanding how people became depressed, anxious, or disturbed. Freudian psychoanalytic theory, on the other hand, had tended to de-emphasize conscious thought. By the late 1950s, advances in behavioral science and experimental psychology had brought up questions of the main assumptions of psychoanalysis, and new theories of the human mind were coming about.
“There are actually several kinds of Cognitive-Behavioral therapies (spelled behavioural in British English), and they all employ the same general premise: in contrast to the psychodynamic emphasis on insight into unconscious motivation, the cognitive-behavioral therapies emphasize the ability of people to make changes in their lives without having to understand why the change occurs. “
(Richmond, 2001)

What is the theory behind Cognitive Behavior Therapy?
By 1962, research into human emotion had found that people’s thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions about events are important in guiding emotional experience (Carson, B.M. 2000). For example, important research showed that people tend to label their physiological arousal according to the environmental situation they perceive. Experiments demonstrated that the physical effects of adrenaline could be labeled as fear, anger, or giddiness, depending on the person’s assumptions and thoughts about their situation. Because people's thoughts had such powerful effects on their emotional experience and emotional ...