Beck's cognitive therapy

Aaron Beck was a psychoanalyst studying depression when he noticed his clients had a stream of quick, unbidden negative thoughts they barely registered. That observation launched Cognitive Therapy (CT) — and gave examiners one of their favorite compare-and-contrast pairs. One framing line to anchor it: where Ellis's REBT is a blunt, directive attack on "irrational" beliefs, Beck's CT is a gentler, collaborative investigation that treats thoughts as hypotheses to be tested.

Start with the automatic thoughts — the rapid, involuntary, plausible-seeming appraisals that pop up between an event and an emotion ("They didn't text back; nobody likes me"). Beneath them lie intermediate beliefs (rules and assumptions) and, at the deepest level, core beliefs or schemas — enduring templates about self, world, and future formed early in life. In depression, Beck named the cognitive triad: negative views of the self, the world, and the future.

The therapeutic stance is collaborative empiricism: counselor and client work as a team, gathering evidence for and against the client's thoughts as if running an experiment. The tool for doing this is Socratic questioning (also called guided discovery) — asking curious, evidence-seeking questions so the client reaches their own conclusions rather than being told. "What's the evidence? Is there another way to see this? What would you tell a friend?"

CT uses thought records, behavioral experiments, and homework to test predictions in the real world. The client learns to catch automatic thoughts, examine the evidence, and generate more balanced alternatives — eventually reshaping the deeper schemas.

Clinical Pearl: For the exam, Beck = automatic thoughts → schemas, worked through collaborative empiricism and Socratic questioning (guided discovery). The clean contrast: Beck collaborates and tests; Ellis disputes and directs.