Even Psychiatrists Hold Onto Decades-Old Anger!

Aaron Temkin Beck (born July 18, 1921) is an American psychiatrist and a professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He is widely regarded as the father of cognitive therapy, and his pioneering theories are widely used in the treatment of clinical depression.  He is the President of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research and the Honorary President of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, which certifies qualified cognitive therapists.

His work at the University of Pennsylvania inspired Dr. Martin Seligman in refining Seligman's own cognitive techniques and exercises and later work on Learned helplessness.

Aaron Beck was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the youngest child of his three siblings. Beck's daughter, Judith S. Beck, is also a researcher in the field of cognitive therapy and director of the Beck Institute.

Beck attended Brown University, graduating magna cum laude in 1942. At Brown he was elected a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, was an associate editor of the Brown Daily Herald, and received the Francis Wayland Scholarship, William Gaston Prize for Excellence in Oratory, and Philo Sherman Bennett Essay Award. Beck attended Yale Medical School, graduating with an M.D. in 1946.

Dr. Beck is an emeritus professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Psychopathology Research Unit (PRU), which is the parent organization of the Center for the Treatment and Prevention of Suicide.

Even before he left the psychoanalytic fold in the 1950s to pursue the study of cognitive therapy, the powerful American Psychoanalytic Institute rejected his membership application on the grounds that his mere desire to conduct scientific studies signaled that he’d been improperly analyzed. (The decision still has the capacity to make him angry: “It was just the height of stupidity . . . total thought control.”) And his fellow psychiatrists, after he left, treated him with an air of pitying condescension. “I was considered one of the deviates,” he says. “People used to say, ‘Poor Tim. He’s a good guy, he just needs more time on the couch.’”