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Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: How to Change Your Mind - Scott H Young

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Psychoanalysis, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, dominates popular impressions of therapy. Patients lying down on long couches while an analyst dissects their dreams for evidence of repressed childhood trauma make for great television, but does it actually work? In the late 1950s, Aaron Beck, a practicing psychoanalyst, decided to test a key concept of Freudian theory. Psychoanalysts explained depression as a masochistic drive—hostility turned inward toward the self. If that were so, Beck would expect those themes to show up in patients’ dreams. However, when he scrutinized these dreams, he didn’t find masochistic imagery. In fact, his patients had fewer hostile images. Instead, he found themes of loss and rejection. This failure of Freudian theory triggered Beck to question his entire discipline’s assumptions. If the theory’s basic tenets couldn’t be demonstrated in experiments, how useful was psychoanalysis? Cognitive therapy was born out of this failure. In the decades since Beck’s pione

Psychoanalysis, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, dominates popular impressions of therapy. Patients lying down on long couches while an analyst dissects their dreams for evidence of repressed childhood trauma make for great television, but does it actually work? In the late 1950s, Aaron Beck , a practicing psychoanalyst, decided to test a key concept of Freudian theory. Psychoanalysts explained depression as a masochistic drive—hostility turned inward toward the self. If that were so, Beck would expect those themes to show up in patients’ dreams. However, when he scrutinized these dreams, he didn’t

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