Aaron Beck

Aaron Temkin Beck, born July 18, 1921, in Providence, Rhode Island, was an American psychiatrist and University of Pennsylvania professor. He is widely recognized as the founder of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), methods now standard for treating clinical depression and various anxiety disorders. Beck created self-report questionnaires for depression and anxiety, most famously the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), a leading tool for gauging depression severity. In 1994, he and his daughter, psychologist Judith S. Beck, established the nonprofit Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which offers CBT treatment, training, and research; Beck served as its President Emeritus until his death in 2021.

Beck wrote extensively on psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide, and psychometrics, publishing over 600 journal articles and authoring or co-authoring 25 books. In July 1989, *The American Psychologist* named him one of the "Americans in history who shaped the face of American psychiatry" and one of the "five most influential psychotherapists of all time."

Beck was the youngest of four children born to Jewish Ukrainian immigrants Elizabeth Temkin and Harry Beck, a printer. His mother’s family had succeeded in tobacco wholesaling, and the family lived a comfortable lower-middle-class life in Providence’s Eastern European-Jewish community. When Aaron was two, they bought a house on Sessions Street in the Blackstone neighborhood. He attended local schools, graduating as valedictorian from Hope Street High School in 1938. As a teen, he aspired to be a journalist. At Brown University, he graduated magna cum laude in 1942, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, served as an associate editor of *The Brown Daily Herald*, and won several academic prizes. He then entered Yale Medical School, intending to become an internist in private practice in Providence, and earned his M.D. in 1946.

After medical school, Beck completed a six-month junior residency in pathology at Rhode Island Hospital and a three-year neurology residency at Cushing Veterans Administration Hospital in Massachusetts. Initially drawn to neurology for its precision, he was required to do a six-month psychiatry rotation due to a shortage of residents; despite initial skepticism, he became absorbed in psychoanalysis. From 1946 to 1950, he finished his internships and residencies, then became a psychiatry fellow at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, until 1952—a facility known for ego psychology and collaboration between psychiatrists and psychologists. He later served as assistant chief of neuropsychiatry at Valley Forge Army Hospital.

In 1954, Beck joined the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Psychiatry, chaired by psychoanalyst Kenneth Ellmaker Appel. Beck also began formal psychoanalytic training at the Philadelphia Institute of the American Psychoanalytic Association. His close colleague was Marvin Stein, a friend from army hospital days. Beck’s first research, with Leon J. Saul—a psychoanalyst who used unusual methods like phone therapy and homework—involved developing an inventory to measure “masochistic” hostility in manifest dreams. Published in 1959, the study found themes of loss and rejection in depression, not inverted hostility as psychoanalysis predicted. With National Institute of Mental Health funding, Beck created the Beck Depression Inventory, published in 1961, and began marketing it despite Appel’s lack of support. Another experiment showed depressed patients sought encouragement after disapproval, contradicting Freudian anger-turned-inward theory.

Through the 1950s, Beck followed the department’s psychoanalytic theories while privately doubting them. In 1961, a controversy over appointing a new chair—fierce psychoanalytic opposition to biomedical researcher Eli Robins—brought tensions to a head. Beck tried to stay neutral and, with Albert J. Stunkard, opposed a petition to block Robins, an early sign of a national shift away from psychoanalysis.