GETTING TO COLONUS:

He "poisoned" the lugubrious, brooding, and sacred atmosphere of orthodox psychoanalysis of the 1950s with hope and pragmatism and good sense--and he was scarcely forgiven for it.

It was a case of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood taking over The Addams Family. Beck, soft-spoken, bow-tie-wearing, calmly rejected the dense, tortured language of Freudian theory and the Kafkaesque, labyrinthine lexicon of psychoanalytic treatment and quietly dethroned the king.

For example: A Jewish woman is conflicted about eating ham and shrimp. "God will punish me if I indulge," she says. Beck might say, "Let's put these automatic thoughts and these beliefs about God to the test. Let's go where the evidence is: Go ahead, eat, my child and let us see if God will strike you dead."

To the Freudians he would say, we don't have to deal with heavy transference and a tortured Oedipus complex in order to be good therapists and help people. We can do away with that and keep the good stuff! You mean, we can be good Jews and not have to keep kosher? Bring on the ham, man. This stuff tastes good!

What about Beck's beliefs? My sense is that he was a belonging Jew, but not a believing one, at least in the formal sense. A good Jew and a good human being were of one gestalt for him. He was a New Englander by birth who wore his ethnicity and religion like a Unitarian from Toronto. He was Jewish, but Jewish-light, very light.

This is not to say that CBT is superficial. It is not. Practitioners of CBT will investigate the source of automatic thoughts that are linked to beliefs. Beck patiently and without malice shucked off the nonlinear, disorderly, and subversive ethos of Old World psychoanalysis. Many credit the CBT master with having rescued psychotherapy from itself. He single-handedly discovered that what is on the surface (and what is superficial) is deep.

Beck once worked with a man who felt unloved by his wife because she left in the morning without saying goodbye. "You think your wife doesn't love you because you believe you are unlovable. There is no evidence to support this idea yet you hold to it. How is this belief helpful to you?" he asked.

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