His approach, developed from the 1960s, is now widely used in the world to treat depression, but also anxiety, eating disorders, personality or other psychiatric problems. The American died, Monday, at the age of 100.
Le Monde with AFP
The American Aaron T. Beck, father of cognitive therapy, an approach developed from the 1960s who revolutionized psychiatry, died, Monday 1 November, at age 100 years old.
He died at home in Philadelphia, in the north-east of the United States, announced in a statement his daughter Judith Beck, president of the Beck Institute, who formed thousands of professionals with behavioral and cognitive therapies (TCC).
“My father has dedicated his life to development and treatment tests to improve countless people in the world who face health problems, he said. He really turned the field. mental health. “
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Unlike the psychoanalysis born of the work of Sigmund Freud, which gives pride of place to the role of the unconscious and encourages patients to tell their memories, cognitive therapy is anchored in the present. During his early years of exercise as a psychiatrist, Aaron T. Beck observed that his patients often expressed negative thoughts (“I am an incapable”), that he subsequently called “automatic thoughts” .
Cognitive therapy thus encourages patients to work on how they perceive situations, identifying these thoughts in order to modify them. They are invited to test these transformations in everyday life. This approach is now widely used in the world to treat depression, but also anxiety, eating disorders, personality or other psychiatric problems.
Previously, “The idea was that if you sat down and listen to” Mhh … Mh “, one way or another secrets would come out,” said Mr. Beck at the New York Times in 2000. And you find yourself exhausted by this impotence. “
“I think that at the bottom, I am a pragmatic,” he added in the same interview. “If it does not work, I do not do it.”
Aaron T. Beck was born in July 1921 in Providence, in the state of Rhode Island, and had a graduate of Brown and Yale universities. He wrote or co-written about twenty books.
He founded the Beck Institute with his daughter in 1994, who had since lavished training on this technique to more than 25,000 health professionals from 130 countries. More than 2,000 studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of behavioral and cognitive therapies, according to this institute.