Abstract
Beck surveys cognitive therapy from birth to 1990s applications — schemas, automatic thoughts, and collaborative empiricism spread across disorders while the core model holds.
Beck, A. T. (1993). Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 61(2), 194–198. DOI
Key findings
- Forty-year arc — From depression to anxiety, personality, and medicine — one cognitive frame.
- Schema layer — Deep beliefs feed surface automatic thoughts.
- Collaborative test — Therapist and client test thoughts — not argue or reassure alone.
- Future spread — CBT becomes exportable protocol — training and manuals scale the model.
Limits
Programmatic review by Beck — history and outlook, not a fresh RCT for each disorder mentioned.
Application
When CBT feels like a toolkit without history — this paper maps past, present, future of the model you already teach. See Cognitive therapy lineage.