1. Father of Cognitive Therapy
Aaron T. Beck
Father of Cognitive Therapy

2. Personal Life Born on July 18, 1921 in Providence, Rhode Island.
Was the youngest child of four children to Jewish, Russian Immigrants.
His father supported the family through the printing trade.
His mother had extreme mood swings, which later had an impact of Beck’s approach to psychology.
Married Phyllis W. Beck, the first female judge on the Pennsylvania Court of Appeals, in 1950.
They now have four adult children, named Alice, Roy, Judy, and Dan.

3. Education Beck attended an array of prestigious institutes, including:
Brown University
Graduated in 1942 with honors.
Awarded the William Gaston Prize for Excellence in Oratory and the Francis Wayland Scholarship
Furthered education at Yale Medical School.
Graduated in 1946 as an M.D.
Attended the Philadelphia Institute of Psychoanalysis, where he graduated in 1958.
Upon graduating from the Philadelphia Institute of Psychoanalysis, Beck began using these methods of psychoanalysis while working with his patients.

4. Jobs
After completing a number of smaller internships, Beck worked at the Austen Riggs Center from 1950 to 1952.
Beck served in the United States Military at Valley Forge Army Hospital as Assistant Chief of Neuropsychiatry.
In 1954, Beck joined the University of Pennsylvania Psychology department, where he hoped to conduct research in order to determine the validity of Freud’s theories.

5. Theory
Beck used these findings at University of Pennsylvania to create his cognitive approach to therapy.
Cognitive behavior therapy:
Is a short-term treatment method.
Uses problem solving to help the patient overcome fears, sleeping problems, relationship issues, etc.
Cognitive behavior therapy focuses on the patient’s way of thinking, rather than their behavior, as the way of thinking is what caused the unwanted behavior in the first place
He identified three different key factors that he thought were responsible for a person’s negative actions:
automatic negative thinking.
negative ideas about a person’s self.
errors in a person’s logic.

6. Present Day
Beck is still alive as of now, and continues to contribute new information to the field of psychology.
He is currently a University Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry. In addition, he is president of the non-profit Beck Institute.
He is also the Director of the Aaron T. Beck Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Beck works on bringing the use of cognitive behavior therapy to communities in order to determine how effective his treatment is in these real world situations.