Excerpts from an Interview with Aaron T. Beck, M.D.

Aaron T. Beck, M.D. and Philip C. Kendall, Ph.D.

May 1998

The following excerpt is from an interview Dr. Aaron T. Beck had with Philip C. Kendall,
Ph.D., a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Doctoral Training Program in Clinical
Psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the Association for
Advancement of Behavioral Therapy in 1996.
Kendall: One question that most people would really like to know from your vantage
point, from your perspective, since Cognitive Therapy has been very influential, is: What are
some of the things that you noticed about its evolution; how did it come about?
Beck: To answer that I really have to go back into the misty fogs of my earliest
professional beginnings. I started off my career in neurology. At one point it was determined
that neurology residents had to spend time in psychiatry. I fought that as much as I could, but I
ended up in psychiatry. And when I was there I had my first real exposure to psychoanalysis.
And I was finally sold on the idea that psychoanalysis really had a pipeline to the truth. And so,
I spent the next several years trotting down the yellow brick road trying to find truth. And
indeed, I got trained as a psychoanalyst and graduated from the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic
Institute in 1956. At that point I noticed that many of my colleagues, particularly those in the
academic psychology departments, were very skeptical about psychoanalysis so I felt that it was
incumbent on me to try to show them the real truth, and so I started to do some research. At
the very beginning I researched dreams and it looked as though my research in dreams actually
did hold up to some psychoanalytic beliefs regarding depression. Technically in the dream of a
depressed person the individual saw himself as the victim of some unpleasant circumstances
and it seemed to me that the individual really had a need to suffer. And the persons, the
patients hostility was inverted against himself and therefore produced all of the symptoms
including the slowing down, sense of rejection, suicidal wishes, and so on. I then felt that in
order to prove this out I had to use some of the experiments that had been developed by
neuropsychologists and other psychologists. I did a whole series of studies to test the
hypothesis that depressed people had a need to suffer. Well, much to my surprise it turned out
that far from having a need to suffer, depressed people had a very strong need to receive
approval, and some type of justification for themselves. And at this point I started to rethink
everything that I had done before, and as I looked at it, it seemed to me that a very
commonsensical approach to these depressive dreams was that depressive people saw
themselves in their dreams as being victims of circumstances, being losers and so on, because
that was their basic perception of themselves. In other words, what we are saying here is that
it was not a motivational process, nor a wish to suffer, but that it was a cognitive process.
Originally published in Cognitive Therapy Today Volume 3, Issue 1. February 1998.