The cognitive revolution in therapeutic practice: adapting scientific ideals and forming subjects in Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy, 1950-1990

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Lisa Malich
• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516932573

Since the 1960s, cognitive therapy has become the most widely used form of psychotherapy and the therapeutic ‘gold standard’ in Western societies. This success is often explained by its roots in science: not only does cognitive therapy supposedly stem from the cognitive revolution brought about by the cognitive sciences, but it demonstrated its therapeutic effectiveness early on via randomized controlled studies. In addition, even its therapeutic practices are oriented towards scientificity, because cognitive therapy aims to correct the irrational thinking of the patients by teaching them to think and to act in rational ways. In the proposed research project, we want to examine the history of cognitive therapy, paying particular attention to its relationship to science and its normative effects on the subjects involved in the therapeutic process, namely, the patients and the practitioners. We are especially interested in the epistemic, cultural, social, and economic contexts surrounding cognitive therapy’s emergence and development. For this purpose, we will focus on the most central and influential model of cognitive therapy, proposed by Aaron T. Beck, that we will analyze in the period of its foundation and establishment from 1950 to 1990 in America. Based on historical epistemology, combined with historical discourse analysis and praxeological approaches, our proposed research will examine source materials from the Beck’s archives, as well as published works and eyewitness interviews with early practitioners and patients. Although the history of cognitive therapy has been mostly neglected by historians of science, we identified five historical trajectories contributing to the development of cognitive therapy as a self-declared scientific approach: the inter-professional competition among mental health professionals promoting new treatments; the development of clinical trials in the context of the crisis of legitimacy of U.S. psychiatry; the cognitive revolution leading to the constitution of the cognitive science; the general ideals of science in post-war America; and the rise of political movements and their promises of social revolutions. Our initial hypothesis is that cognitive therapy did not develop as a monolithic and unique style of reasoning, claiming to follow scientific ideals, but as a dynamic, changing, and only relatively coherent assemblage of therapeutic and research practices with specific normative effects on subjects. We aim to show that 'science' functioned in CT in at least four ways: as a discursive ideal for boundary work, as a form of symbolic capital, a way of standardizing and circulating practices, and as a technology of the self.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants