(Washington) American Aaron T. Beck, father of cognitive therapy, an approach developed from the 1960s that revolutionized psychiatry, died Monday at the age of 100.
He died at his home in Philadelphia in the northeastern United States, his daughter Judith Beck, president of the Beck Institute, which has trained thousands of professionals in behavioral and cognitive therapy (CBT), said in a statement.
“My father has dedicated his life to developing and testing treatments to improve the lives of countless people around the world who face health issues,” she said. “He really transformed the field of mental health. ”
Unlike the psychoanalysis born from the work of Sigmund Freud, which gives pride of place to the role of the unconscious and encourages patients to recount their memories, cognitive therapy is anchored in the present.
During his early years as a psychiatrist, Aaron T. Beck observed that his patients often expressed negative thoughts (“I am incapable” …), which he later called “automatic thoughts”. “.
Cognitive therapy thus encourages patients to work on the way they perceive situations, by identifying these thoughts in order to modify them. They are invited to test these transformations in everyday life.
This approach is now widely used around the world to treat depression, but also anxiety, eating disorders, personality disorders or other psychiatric problems.
Previously, “the idea was that if you would sit down and listen and say ‘Mhh .. mh’ somehow the secrets would come out…” said Dr.r Beck at New York Times in 2000. “And you found yourself exhausted by this helplessness. ”
“I think that deep down I’m a pragmatist,” he added in the same interview. “If that doesn’t work, I don’t. ”
Aaron T. Beck was born in July 1921 in Providence, Rhode Island, and graduated from Brown University and Yale University. He has written or co-authored around twenty books.
He founded the Beck Institute with his daughter in 1994, who has since provided training in this technique to more than 25,000 healthcare professionals in 130 countries.
More than 2,000 studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of behavioral and cognitive therapies, according to this institute.