Beck, Aaron T.

Aaron Temkin Beck, MD, founder of cognitive therapy, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 18, 1921. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who valued education and community involvement. His father, Harry Beck, was both the owner of a print shop and a member of the printers' union. Elizabeth Temkin Beck, his mother, had raised her eight younger brothers and sisters after her own mother died and she became the family matriarch. She was president of several local organizations and assertively spoke her opinions at public meetings. According to her sons, it is likely that Lizzie Beck suffered periodically from depression, which began when her only daughter died in the influenza epidemic of 1919. Many family members think that Aaron's birth relieved her depression.

A playground accident and resulting infection nearly killed Beck when he was 7 years old. He attributes his anxieties about surgery and abandonment to this trauma, for he was told that his arm was going to be x-rayed, but instead he was taken to surgery. Moreover, the surgeon began cutting before Beck was unconscious. The infection from his injury required an extended hospitalization, and he missed so much school that he was held back. This, he says, made him feel inferior to his classmates. Following his recovery, he studied so hard that he surpassed his classmates and skipped a grade. He believes this experience taught him how to turn a disadvantage into an advantage, a skill and perspective that would aid him throughout his career.

At Brown University, Beck majored in English and political science and won prizes for essays and oratory. He graduated from Yale School of Medicine, intending to become a neurologist. It was by chance that he entered psychiatry. As a neurology resident at Cushing Veterans Administration Hospital, he was required to do a psychiatry rotation. His earlier studies of psychiatry had left him cold, for he found the Kraepelinian approaches nihilistic and psychodynamic formulations unsubstantiated. As a resident, he struggled with psychoanalytic formulations because he thought they were unscientific. Believing that his pragmatism and rebelliousness interfered with his acceptance of psychoanalysis, he began his own personal analysis, which continued for several years.

Following initial publications on schizophrenia and combat stress, Beck focused on depression and dream research in 1959 in order to substantiate the psychoanalytic hypothesis that depressed individuals experience anger turned inward as the result of an earlier loss of a love object. In this and subsequent studies, Beck found that the themes in the dreams and waking thoughts of depressed persons were rejection, sensitivity to failure, and negative expectations, not hostility or a masochistic need to suffer. Thus, he began to reformulate the model of depression from being based on a person's motivation to how a person processes information in a negatively biased way.

Beck's thinking was influenced by George Kelly, Karen Horney, Alfred Adler, and Harry Stack Sullivan. Kelly's work provided validation for a nonmotivational model, and his term “constructs” is like Beck's “schemas.” Adler, Horney, and Sullivan were professional models with whom he could identify as he moved away from traditional analysts. Beck found his closest colleagues, however, among psychologists, and in 1963, Beck and Albert Ellis discovered similarities in their formulations, both emphasizing the role of cognition in emotional distress and dysfunctional behavior.

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