Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

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The Origins of Cognitive Behavior Therapy
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 Freudian psychoanalytic therapies. Though both of these men trained with Freud, they 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, tended to de-emphasize conscious thought. By the late 1950s, advances in behavioral science and experimental psychology had raised questions of the main assumptions of psychoanalysis, and new theories of the human mind were being introduced.
“There are actually several kinds of Cognitive-Behavioral therapies (spelled behavioural in British English), employing 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)
The Theory behind Cognitive Behavior Therapy
By 1962, research into human emotion found that people’s thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions regarding events were important in guiding emotional experience (Carson, B.M. 2000). For example, important research showed that people labeled their physiological arousal according to the environmental situation they perceived. 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 behavior, scientists were forced to devise new theories to account for th...