Deeply mourn Aaron Baker, the father of cognitive behavioral therapy, at the age of 100

Aaron Temkin Beck (Aaron Temkin Beck, 1921.7.18 –2021.11.01) _spanspan

Cognitive Therapy Len Baker passed away on November 1, 2021, at the age of 100.

This is the third psychology master who has left us this year and deeply cherishes their outstanding contributions to the development of psychology.

Aaron Baker is the founder of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy . Cognitive therapy is widely used in clinical depression and the treatment of various anxiety disorders . Baker has also developed the depression and anxiety self-report measurement methods, especially the "Baker Depression Inventory" (BDI), which has become one of the most widely used depression measurement tools. In 1994, he and his daughter, psychologist Judith S. Beck (Judith S. Beck) founded the non-profit organization Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy (Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy) to provide CBT treatment and training, and Carrying out CBT research, Baker served as the honorary chairman of the organization until his death.

Baker is well-known for his books on psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide and psychometrics. He has published more than 600 papers in professional journals and 25 books. In July 1989, he was named one of the "Americans Who Shaped the Face of American Psychiatry" by the "American Psychologist" and one of the "Five Most Influential Psychotherapists of All Time".In 2017, Medscape (medical APP) ranked Baker as the fourth most influential doctor in the past century.

Personal life experience

Baker was born in a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant family in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. He is the youngest of four children. He studied at Brown University and graduated with honors in 1942. During his studies at Brown University, he was selected as a member of the American College Honors Society, an associate editor of the "Brown Pioneer Daily", and won the Francis Wayland Scholarship, the William Gaston Outstanding Speech Award and Philo Xie Herman Bennett Essay Award. Later, Baker entered the Yale University School of Medicine and graduated in 1946 with a doctorate in medicine.

In 1950, Baker married Phyllis Baker. Phyllis Baker was the first female judge of the Pennsylvania Federal Court of Appeals. Her youngest daughter Alice Baker Dubbo was also a judge of that court. They There are four children in all: Roy, Judy, Dan and Alice. Baker’s daughter Judith is an outstanding Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) expert and clinician. She has written many important books in the field and is also the co-founder of the non-profit organization Baker Institute.

Baker celebrated his 100th birthday on July 18, 2021, and died at his home in Philadelphia later on November 1 of the same year.

Career development

Early career

From 1946 to 1950, Baker completed his medical internship and residency work and became a psychiatrist at the Austen Riggs Center Researcher until 1952. At the time, the Austin Riggs Center was the center of 's self-psychology ,There is close cooperation between psychiatrists and psychologists. Baker later served as deputy director of the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Valley Forge Army Hospital in the U.S. military.

University of Pennsylvania

In 1954, Baker joined the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. The head of the department at the time was Kenneth Ellmaker Appel, a psychoanalyst and a former president of the American Psychiatric Association. He was very interested in Baker’s career Had a big impact. At the same time, Baker began to receive formal psychoanalysis training at the Philadelphia Institute of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Baker’s first study was conducted in collaboration with the psychoanalyst Leon J. Saul, who is known for unusual methods such as using telephone therapy or assigning homework, and he developed A questionnaire used to quantify the self-process in the explicit content of the dream (content that can be directly reported by the dreamer). Baker and a graduate student developed a new questionnaire to assess the "masochistic" hostility of in explicit dreams , and published it in 1959. This study found that the subject of loss and rejection was related to depression, not the reverse hostility predicted by psychoanalysis .

With funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, Baker completed the "Baker Depression Inventory" , which was published in 1961 and was soon put into use. In another experiment, he found that depression patients would seek encouragement or improvement after being denied, instead of Freud 's "angry turns to the inner" theory predicted.Seek pain and failure.

Throughout the 1950s, Baker insisted on 's psychoanalytic theory , but he doubted it privately and began to conduct experimental research.

private clinic

Later, Baker requested a vacation and planned to work in a private clinic for 5 years. In 1962, he began to record the thinking patterns of patients with depression, emphasizing what can be observed and tested and currently treated. He studied George Kelly's personal construction theory and Jean Piaget 's schema .

Baker published his first article on the cognitive theory of depression in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1963 and 1964. The article maintained the psychology of the self, but then turned to the reality of the new cognitive psychology. The concept of ism and scientific thinking , and expanded into a kind of treatment.

Baker’s notebook is full of self-analysis. For several years, he wrote down his “negative” (later “automation” ) thinking, scoring, classification and reorganization at least twice a day.

For Baker, the most important psychologist is Albert Ellis (Albert Ellis). In the mid-1950s, Ellis began to propose his "rational therapy" . Baker recalled that after he published two articles on the Archives of General Psychiatry , Ellis contacted him in the mid-1960s, so he discovered that Ellis had developed a wealth of theories and practical treatments. method,And to some extent use it as a framework to combine with his own ideas. In 1975, psychoanalyst Gerald E. Kochansky said in a review of Baker's book that he could no longer tell whether Baker was a psychoanalyst or a believer in Ellis.

In 1967, Baker became active again at the University of Pennsylvania. He still describes himself and his new therapy as a neo-Floydist of the self-psychological school, even though he focuses on the interaction with the environment, not the inner Driving force. He regards cognitive therapy work as a relatively "neutral" zone and a bridge to psychology.

Baker's cognitive therapy

When Baker was treating patients with depression, he discovered that they experienced a series of negative thoughts that seemed to be spontaneous. He called these cognitions "span11span automated thinking " , and found that its content can be divided into three categories: 's negative views of himself, the world, and the future_spanstrongspan9 _spanstrongspan 37strong . He pointed out that these cognitions are interrelated.

Baker began to help patients identify and evaluate these ideas, and found that by doing so, patients were able to think more realistically, which made them perform better emotionally and behaviorally. He put forward the main point of cognitive behavioral therapy , and explained that different disorders of are related to different types of distorted thinking .Distorted thinking has a negative impact on a person's behavior, no matter what type of obstacle it is. Baker explained that a successful intervention will lead a person to understand and realize his distorted thinking and how to challenge its impact. Frequent and passive automated thinking reveals a person's core beliefs, and core beliefs are formed during a lifetime; people "feel" these beliefs to be correct.

Common types of distorted thinking

■ arbitrary inference (arbitrary inference) refers to arbitrary conclusions without sufficient and relevant evidence. Such distortions include "catastrophe is imminent" or thinking about the worst of a situation.

■ Selective abstraction (selective abstraction) refers to drawing conclusions based on part of the details of the entire incident, regardless of the significance of the entire context.

■ Overgeneralization (overgeneralization) refers to the inappropriate application of unreasonable beliefs about the occurrence of an unexpected event to irrelevant events or situations.

■ enlarge and devalue (magnification and minimization) refers to overemphasis or underestimation of the importance of an event or situation.

■ personalization (personalization) refers to a tendency to associate external events with oneself, even if there is no reason to do so.

■ labeling and mislabeling (labeling and mislabeling) refers to determining one's true identity based on past imperfections or mistakes.

■ polarized thinking (polarized thinking) refers to an all-or-nothing approach when thinking or explaining,Or use the extreme classification of "either...or...". This dichotomy thinking only divides things into "good or bad".

excerpted from "Psychological Space Network"

Baker and his colleagues studied the efficacy of cognitive therapy in the treatment of various diseases, including depression, Bipolar disorder, eating disorders, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, personality disorders and many other diseases with psychological components . He also focuses on schizophrenia , borderline personality disorder and cognitive therapy for patients with repeated suicide attempts .

Baker's recent study on schizophrenia treatment shows that patients who were once considered unresponsive to treatment can make positive changes. Even the most serious symptoms, such as long-term hospitalization, weird behavior, poor bowel movements, self-harm, and aggressiveness, can be positively changed through cognitive behavioral therapy.

However, some mental health experts object to Baker’s cognitive model, believing that its treatment methods are too mechanical or too limited in terms of mental activity. Baker's work is considered to be a more scientific and experimental development than psychoanalysis. Baker’s core principles are not necessarily based on the general findings and models of the development of cognitive psychology or neuroscience at the time, but are derived from his personal clinical observations and interpretations in his treatment work.

Although there are many cognitive models for different mental disorders, and hundreds of research results on the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy, people pay much less attention to the so-called mechanism through experiments; in some cases Under the hood, the researchers did not find causal relationships, such as the relationship between dysfunctional beliefs and outcomes.

| Baker | 's main work

1975, "Cognitive Therapy and Emotional Disorders"

1985, "Anxiety Disorders and Phobias: A Cognitive Perspective

" 1990, "The Cognitive Behavioral Therapy of Personality Disorders"

2009, "Depression" (2nd edition)

2011, "Thinking this way, you will not be anxious: just open it up and use anti-anxiety Handbook

｜Beck｜ The scale compiled by

"Beck Depression Inventory Scale , BDI Hope , BDI) Hope )

"Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation" (Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation,BSS)

Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI)

Beck Youth Inventories

-Clark-Clark-pan Beck Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory, CBOCI)

"Children's Depression Inventory" (the Children's Depression Inventory)

｜ Baker｜ coltrbody