PS210 Unit 10 Historical Roots of CBT Paper Example

One Therapy, Six Schools: A PS210 Unit 10 Paper Tracing the Historical Roots of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS210: History of Psychology

Unit 10 Historical Roots Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The argument connecting the schools is the writer's own; the sources cited are real.

A Modern Session

Consider an ordinary session of cognitive behavioral therapy for a fear of highway driving, the kind my sister received last year. The therapist begins by asking how the past week went and listening carefully. Together they rate her anxiety about driving from zero to one hundred. They examine a thought she had before a trip, if I have a panic attack at sixty miles an hour I will crash, and weigh the evidence for and against it. They agree on next week's exposure step: driving one exit on the interstate at midday, staying on until her anxiety falls. Every part of this session has a history.

Learned Fear: Locke to Jones

The assumption that her fear was learned, and can be unlearned, goes back to John Locke's argument in 1690 that ideas come from experience and that chance associations can attach unreasonable feelings to places (Locke, 1690). Locke offered no method. The method came from the behaviorists. Watson and Rayner (1920) showed that a fear could be conditioned in an infant, and Jones (1924) showed that one could be undone by bringing a feared object closer step by step while the child was calm. Joseph Wolpe's systematic desensitization in the 1950s turned her procedure into a treatment for adults (Wolpe, 1958). The exposure step at the end of my sister's session is Jones's procedure on an interstate.

Measurement: Wundt to the Rating Scale

The zero-to-one-hundred rating descends from the founding of laboratory psychology. Wundt's observers judged the intensity of sensations on repeated trials, and functionalists such as James asked what mental processes accomplish. Modern therapists combine both habits: they measure anxiety repeatedly and ask what avoidance does for the client. Introspection as a method failed, but the commitment to measuring experience survived.

The rating scale, the thought record and the exposure step each carry a different school's fingerprints.

Beliefs: From Psychoanalysis's Critics to Beck

Examining a thought such as I will crash comes from a different line. Freud placed anxiety in unconscious conflict, which proved hard to test. His critics moved the explanation toward what people believe: Adler's style of life and Karen Horney's tyranny of the should describe rigid convictions that shape feeling (Horney, 1950). Ellis and Beck, who began their careers inside the psychoanalytic tradition, made that attention the core of new treatments. Beck's cognitive therapy taught clients to identify automatic thoughts and test them against evidence (Beck et al., 1979).

Permission to Study Thought: The Cognitive Revolution

Beck could build a scientific therapy around thoughts because psychology had again accepted thinking as a subject of experiment. Gestalt psychologists had argued that experience is organized into meaningful wholes, and the cognitive psychologists of the 1950s and 1960s studied memory, attention and language as information processing (Neisser, 1967). Without that shift, a therapy built on changing thoughts would have been dismissed as unscientific in a field dominated by behaviorism.

The Relationship: Rogers

The careful listening at the start of the session comes from humanistic psychology. Rogers (1957) defined the conditions of a helping relationship, genuineness, unconditional positive regard and empathic understanding, and tested them by recording sessions. Beck's manuals adopted warmth, empathy and genuineness as necessary conditions while adding that technique was also required.

What Each School Would Not Recognize

None of the founders would recognize the whole session. Watson would object to the thought record, since he thought private experience lay outside science. Freud would find the session too brief and too focused on the present. Rogers would question the homework and the therapist's direction of the agenda. Wundt would find the rating scale crude compared with his laboratory judgments. That each founder would disapprove of a different part is itself evidence of the therapy's mixed descent: it took what worked from each school and discarded what did not.

Why It Took So Long

The history also explains the delays. Jones published her method in 1924, but exposure therapy did not spread until Wolpe's work in the 1950s, partly because the behaviorist psychology of the time was more interested in laboratory animals than in clinical treatment, and partly because psychoanalysis dominated American psychiatry. Beck's cognitive therapy, developed in the 1960s, gained wide acceptance only after controlled trials in the 1970s showed results comparable to medication for depression. Each part of the session waited for the field to accept the kind of evidence that supported it.

What the History Leaves Undone

The history also explains what the therapy still has to work on. Early laboratories drew both their scientists and their subjects from a narrow slice of society, and the field's tools were sometimes used against the people they studied (Guthrie, 2004). Cognitive behavioral therapy was first tested largely with participants from similar backgrounds, and clinicians now adapt its examples, language and assumptions about family and independence for clients from other cultures. Tracing the therapy's roots makes that task easier to see: a practice built from many schools also inherited their blind spots.

A Second Look at My Sister's Session

Seen through this history, my sister's therapy no longer looks like a single technique. When her therapist had her score her fear on every outing, start and finish, she was using a measurement habit from the laboratory. When they wrote down the thought I will crash and weighed it, they were doing what Beck taught, using a permission the cognitive revolution had won. When she drove one more exit each week, she was following a path Jones mapped with a rabbit and a toddler. And the reason she trusted the therapist enough to try was the relationship Rogers described. She did not need to know any of this to benefit. Knowing it makes clearer why the therapy works and where its assumptions came from.

Conclusion

Cognitive behavioral therapy is sometimes described as a modern invention of the 1960s and 1970s. Followed back, it looks more like a meeting point. Its exposure steps belong to the behaviorists, its rating scales to the founders, its focus on beliefs to psychoanalysis's critics and the cognitive revolution, and its relationship to Rogers. Leahey (2018) argues that psychology's history is a series of attempts to answer old questions with new methods, and one ordinary therapy session shows how many of those attempts are still at work.

References

Beck, A. T., Rush, A. J., Shaw, B. F., & Emery, G. (1979). Cognitive therapy of depression. Guilford Press.

Guthrie, R. V. (2004). Even the rat was white: A historical view of psychology (2nd ed.). Pearson.

Horney, K. (1950). Neurosis and human growth: The struggle toward self-realization. W. W. Norton.

Jones, M. C. (1924). A laboratory study of fear: The case of Peter. The Pedagogical Seminary, 31(4), 308-315. https://doi.org/10.1080/08856559.1924.9944851

Leahey, T. H. (2018). A history of psychology: From antiquity to modernity (8th ed.). Routledge.

Locke, J. (1690). An essay concerning human understanding. Thomas Basset.

Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95-103. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045357

Watson, J. B., & Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0069608

Wolpe, J. (1958). Psychotherapy by reciprocal inhibition. Stanford University Press.