Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: The Science Behind the Most Widely Practiced Psychotherapy in the World

In the 1960s, Aaron Beck was treating depressed patients using psychoanalysis — free association, dream interpretation, uncovering unconscious hostility. Then he started asking his patients what they were thinking during sessions. What he found was not repressed aggression. It was a stream of rapid, specific, self-defeating thoughts his patients barely noticed they were having: 'I'm stupid,' 'I'll fail,' 'No one likes me.' Beck had discovered automatic thoughts — and with them, an entirely different theory of what depression was and how to treat it.