Aaron T. Beck

Aaron T. Beck, who is known as Tim to his friends, was born in 1921, in Rhode Island, USA. He is the youngest of four siblings.

In the 1940’s

In his 20s, he completed his undergraduate degree at Brown University, then he received a medical degree from Yale University, and completed residencies in pathology and psychiatry. During his first residency, Beck already won awards for scholarship and oratory at Brown University.

In the 1950’s

During the 1950s, Beck went on with his psychiatric studies—first at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and then at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Society, where at the age of 35, he graduated as a psychoanalyst in 1956. He also
The 1980s

In this decade, Beck and his colleagues made new frameworks on understanding anxiety, substance abuse and relationship conflicts. It is his contributions in the study of anxiety that became the highlight of this decade for Beck. He proposed that all anxiety are results of overestimations of danger and/or underestimation of coping resources.

Beck also created considerable time and effort in this decade to build an interactive and visible international community of scholars. He also worked with colleagues to apply the cognitive theory to stress and anger. This resulted to his popular press book, Love Is Never Enough, which is applied to couples in conflict. Here he discussed how cognitive distortions can operate within close relations and turn love into hate. He also demonstrated the advantages of cognitive therapy principles to keep peace inside relationships, and maintain it positive and meaningful. Moreover to what transpired in this decade, Beck was granted with several large national research on the uses of cognitive therapy with substance abuse, particularly heroin, cocaine, and alcohol abuse.

The 1990s

In the 1990’s cognitive therapy already became the mainstream choice for effective brief therapy for depression and anxiety among therapists in North America and the United Kingdom. Beck’s theory of depression became widely studied. Several publications