He had a different effect, however, on many of his contemporaries. When he first described his approach, Freudian analysts ventured that he “had not been well analyzed,” the ultimate insider’s put-down, implying that he was unequipped to understand others because he had not fully understood himself in his training therapy.
Later, in the 1980s, Dr. Beck was hit from the other side: So-called biological psychiatrists, who focused on drug treatments, questioned the strength of C.B.T. studies, saying that they were unimpressive compared with drug trials. To the extent that the therapy worked, argued Dr. Donald Klein, then director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, it was because of a general morale-boosting effect rather than a specific, targeted treatment.
Dr. Beck hardened with a blunt New England edge when challenged. But he typically responded with a pile of new data, and avoided being drawn into intellectual blood feuds with other theorists.
Cognitive therapy spread worldwide, in part because therapists found it useful and in part because its techniques could be summarized simply in manuals, making it easy to standardize, teach and use in research studies. Dr. Beck, patient, plain-spoken and persuasive, was its most effective ambassador.
In the first chapter of his classic 1967 book, “Depression: Causes and Treatment,” he observed: “There is an astonishing contrast between the depressed person’s image of himself and the objective facts. A wealthy man moans that he doesn’t have the financial resources to feed his children. A widely acclaimed beauty begs for plastic surgery in the belief that she is ugly. An eminent physicist berates himself ‘for being stupid.’”
He wrote or co-wrote 22 books in all, on technical psychiatric topics as well as love, anger and chronic pain, including three with his daughter Judith.
In his last years Dr. Beck applied cognitive techniques to help largely forgotten groups of people, like destitute drug addicts and people with late-stage schizophrenia. “These people have some capacity to do better, but they have all these defeatist attitudes and expectations; they assume they’re going to fail,” he said in an interview with The Times in 2009 in Bala Cynwyd.
He was also advising a friend who had terminal cancer. “He’s having mood problems, and who wouldn’t?” Dr. Beck said. “I’m having him spend 30 minutes every day, at the beginning of the day, to think about how important this day is — that it may be the most important day of his life, or one of richest.”
Source : Nytimes
