Cognitive therapy: Aaron Beck

Abstract

Aaron Beck was born on 18 July 1921 in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the fourth son of Russian Jewish immigrants. At the age of seven he had a near fatal illness that made his mother even more overprotective than she already was. One of her sons had failed to survive and her daughter had died in the influenza epidemic of 1919. Aaron developed many phobias and anxieties while growing up, including fear of surgery, abandonment, heights, suffocation and public speaking. At his high school graduation he was top of his class and he went on to major in English and political science at Brown University. He gained an MD at Yale University School of Medicine but went into psychiatry as there was a shortage of psychiatric residents, completing a six months’ rotation. He decided to remain in psychiatry and from 1950–52 was a fellow in psychiatry at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology certified him in psychiatry in 1953, and in 1958 he graduated from the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. His work between 1960 and 1963 led to the development of cognitive therapy.