Running Head: BECK
1
Aaron Beck
Lauren Gibler
Psychology 4310: Theories of Personality
November 6, 2015
Arthur D. Kemp, Ph.D., M.S.
Associate Professor of Psychological Science
BECK
2
Aaron Beck
Aaron Beck is a contemporary psychiatrist well known in the psychology world for
creating the use of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) in psychotherapy. He had spent most of
his life studying psychoanalysis; he didn’t really have an interest in studying Cognitive Behavior
Therapy until he was working many years as a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania. He
noticed that a lot of his patients had issues with suppressing their negative thoughts. The
thoughts they were having kept recurring, and this was stopping them from overcoming
depression; it wasn’t allowing room for any progress. After experiencing numerous clients with
this problem, he realized that in order to fix this problem and stop the negative thoughts from
recurring, Beck had to change the way they were thinking. The only answer to this problem was
