Aaron Beck

Aaron Temkin Beck (July 18, 1921 – November 1, 2021) was an American psychiatrist who was a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

His pioneering methods are widely used in the treatment of clinical depression and various anxiety disorders.

Beck also developed self-report measures for depression and anxiety, notably the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), which became one of the most widely used instruments for measuring the severity of depression.

Aaron Temkin Beck was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 18, 1921.

He was the youngest of four children born to Elizabeth Temkin and Harry Beck, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine.

Harry worked as a printer and Elizabeth's family found financial success in tobacco wholesaling; the family belonged to the upwardly-mobile vanguard of Providence's Eastern European-Jewish immigrant community.

At the time of Aaron's birth, the Temkin-Becks lived a "comfortable, lower-middle class lifestyle" and were in the process of putting down roots on Providence's East Side.

In 1923, when Aaron was two years old, the family purchased a house at 43/41 Sessions Street in the city's Blackstone neighborhood.

Beck attended John Howland Grammar School, Nathan Bishop Junior High, and Hope Street High School, where he graduated as valedictorian in 1938.

As an adolescent, Beck dreamed of becoming a journalist.

Beck matriculated at Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1942.

At Brown, he was elected a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, was an associate editor of The Brown Daily Herald, and received the Francis Wayland Scholarship, William Gaston Prize for Excellence in Oratory, and Philo Sherman Bennett Essay Award.

Beck attended Yale Medical School, planning to become an internist and work in private practice in Providence.

He graduated from Yale with a Doctor of Medicine in 1946.

After receiving his M.D., Beck completed a six-month junior residency in pathology at Rhode Island Hospital and a three-year residency in neurology at Cushing Veterans Administration Hospital in Framingham, Massachusetts.

During this time, Beck began to specialize in neurology, reportedly liking the precision of its procedures.

However, due to a shortage of psychiatry residents, he was instructed to do a six-month rotation in that field, and he became absorbed in psychoanalysis, despite initial wariness.

After completing his medical internships and residencies from 1946 to 1950, Beck became a fellow in psychiatry at the Austen Riggs Center, a private mental hospital in the mountains of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, until 1952.

At that time, it was a center of ego psychology with an unusual degree of collaboration between psychiatrists and psychologists, including David Rapaport.

Beck then completed military service as assistant chief of neuropsychiatry at Valley Forge Army Hospital in the United States Military.

Through the 1950s, Beck adhered to the department's psychoanalytic theories while pursuing experimentation and harboring private doubts.

Beck then joined the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954.

The department chair was Kenneth Ellmaker Appel, a psychoanalyst who was president of the American Psychiatric Association, whose efforts to expand the presence and relatedness of psychiatry had a big influence on Beck's career.

At the same time, Beck began formal training in psychoanalysis at the Philadelphia Institute of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Beck's closest colleague was Marvin Stein, a friend since their army hospital days to whom Beck looked up to for his scientific rigor in psychoneuroimmunology.

Beck's first research was with Leon J. Saul, a psychoanalyst known for unusual methods such as therapy by telephone or setting homework, who had developed inventory questionnaires to quantify ego processes in the manifest content of dreams (that which can be directly reported by the dreamer).

Beck and a graduate student developed a new inventory they used to assess "masochistic" hostility in manifest dreams, published in 1959.

This study found themes of loss and rejection related to depression, rather than inverted hostility as predicted by psychoanalysis.

Developing the work with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, Beck came up with what he would call the Beck Depression Inventory, which he published in 1961 and soon started to market, unsupported by Appel.

In another experiment, he found that depressed patients sought encouragement or improvement following disapproval, rather than seeking out suffering and failure as predicted by the Freudian anger-turned-inwards theory.

In 1961, however, controversy over whom to appoint the new chair of psychiatry—specifically, fierce psychoanalytic opposition to the favored choice of biomedical researcher Eli Robins—brought matters to a head, an early skirmish in a power shift away from psychoanalysis nationally.

Beck tried to remain neutral and, with Albert J. Stunkard, opposed a petition to block Robins.

Stunkard, a behaviorist who specialized in obesity and who had dropped out of psychoanalytic training, was eventually appointed department head in the face of sustained opposition which again Beck would not engage in, putting him at bitter odds with his friend Stein.

He was named one of the "Americans in history who shaped the face of American psychiatry", and one of the "five most influential psychotherapists of all time" by The American Psychologist in July 1989.

His work at the University of Pennsylvania inspired Martin Seligman to refine his own cognitive techniques and later work on learned helplessness.

In 1994 he and his daughter, psychologist Judith S. Beck, founded the nonprofit Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which provides CBT treatment and training, as well as research.

Beck served as President Emeritus of the organization up until his death.

Beck was noted for his writings on psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide, and psychometrics.

He published more than 600 professional journal articles, and authored or co-authored 25 books.