Aaron T. Beck
Aaron Temkin Beck ( born July 18, 1921 in Providence, Rhode Iceland ) is an American psychiatrist and psychotherapist. He is considered the father of cognitive behavioral therapy and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Around the same time as Albert Ellis, he changed the classical behavioral therapy and added to cognitive concepts, which he applied primarily to the psychotherapy of depression.
- 4.1 Basic assumption of the therapeutic approach
- 4.2 The goal of therapy
- 4.3 Six steps of cognitive restructuring
- 4.4 Methods of cognitive restructuring
Life
He studied until 1942 at Brown University and then moved to Yale University, where he received his doctorate in psychiatry in 1946. During the Korean War, he worked at Valley Forge Hospital. 1976/1977 he was president of the Society for Psychotherapy Research. In 2006 he received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research in 2011 and the Prince Mahidol Award. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the Institute Psychopatholgischen the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests lie in the fields of psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide research and in the development of diagnostic methods.
Psychological assumptions
Aaron T. Beck began his therapeutic work as a psychoanalyst. However, he soon realized that did not result in the psychoanalytic work with depressed patients to the desired results, and developed cognitive therapy, with whom he achieved significant successes. The cognitive method is where the negative thinking and perspectives and the resulting automatic thoughts. Beck sees mental disorders as a result of mismatched settings, a one-sided approach and associated errors in reasoning and automatic thoughts.
Schemes and fallacies
Beck points out in his approach, especially the importance of the distorted view of reality, the resulting perceptions and interpretations for the development and maintenance of mental disorders. Important in this context is the cognitive triad. The cognitive triad is reflected in depressed patients in content primarily through a distorted negative view and way of thinking in relation to themselves, their environment and their future from. Confirmed this distorted view of reality and strengthens again and again by a number of typical logical errors, commit the depressive patients. A distinction can be made between six categories of typical logical error in the information processing in depressed patients. The errors can affect both the data collection and the conclusions from the data. Examples of B. Wilken (page 25f. )
1 Arbitrary inference
2 Selectively generalizing
3 Übergeneralisieren
4 Maximize and Minimize
5 personalized
6 Verabsolutiertes, dichotomous thinking
Adapted incorrect settings have their origin in childhood and represent undue schemes to assess in relation to the rest of the world. They form the cognitive basis for certain forms of thought which are especially evident in stressful situations. That is, a latent predisposition, for example, in childhood was acquired through social learning, is reactivated under certain circumstances. The activated schemas are looking in the following again and again even confirmed by the above error in the information processing. This leads to a narrowing of thought, that is, to a significantly distorted view of reality in the sense of negative schemas.
Automatic thoughts
Of central importance for the perception and depressive symptoms of the patient according to Beck, the so-called " automatic thoughts ". This refers to fast running, lightning occurring subjectively plausible and involuntarily adjusting cognitions that lie between an event ( or externaler internaler type ) and an emotional experience ( consequence ). The automatic thoughts are usually distorted in the sense of thinking errors described above. These intrusive automatic thoughts are the patients most at the start of therapy is not aware, however, can be made aware of and are thus the therapeutic editing accessible.
Depressogenic assumptions
The automatic, situation-specific thoughts deliver according to Beck, the possibility of access to the underlying, more fundamental and situational overarching " depressogenic assumptions ". Depressogenic assumptions are those dysfunctional beliefs that predispose the person to depression. The basic assumptions are not directly aware of and can usually be articulated by the patient only after prolonged introspection. They are harder to detect and edit as automatic thoughts. Beck enumerates some basic assumptions that dispositionieren to depression, here are some examples ( from Wilken, 1998, p 28):
The analysis
The therapy
Basic assumption of the therapeutic procedure
If the content is altered cognitions as well as the experience, feeling and behavior of a person will change. A correction of dysfunctional cognitions at least leads to an improvement in the condition of the depressed person.
The goal of therapy
The main goal of cognitive therapy after Beck 's theory, it is the distorted reality not just cognitions that are the clients of major depressive disorder reason to change towards a realitätsadäquatere perception and interpretation of reality. The depressive thinking, which is described as a global, one-dimensional, absolutist, irreversible and judgmental to be influenced specifically towards a differentiated thinking with the attributes, multi-dimensional, relativizing, reversible and non-judgmental. The client should learn in the course of therapy to identify his distorted reality not just cognitions independently and, ultimately, to change. Before the cognitive therapy can take place in the narrow sense, are the gradual increase in general behavioral interventions initiated by the activity level of the client, because inactivity occurs very frequently in depressed patients.
Six steps of cognitive restructuring
1st performance of the cognitive model
2 detection and awareness of dysfunctional cognitions:
3 questioning of dysfunctional cognitions
4 reflection of the cognitions
5 development of alternative beliefs
6 Training of functional cognitions
Methods of cognitive restructuring
Central method of interviewing is the so -called " Socratic dialogue " so that the client should be instructed to identify his dysfunctional thought content and change it. Cognitive homework (in the form of written workouts - such as column techniques, daily logs of negative thoughts ) also apply. The core of the technology is the so-called pelvic reality check. The aim is to test the distorted cognitions of reality, that is to consider how the formulated perceptions and interpretations of the clients are empirically verifiable and what cognitive distortions may be they are based. In this reality check of the client is to collect observations that contradict his interpretations or conclusions as instructed in everyday life.