Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Basic Principles and Applications

The fundamentals of cognitive therapy have been around since the ancient Greeks. The idea that our perceptions determine the reality that we experience was clearly a focus of Plato' idealism. In a classic story, known as "Plato's Cave", Socrates describes how a group of men who are chained facing a wall observe shadows dancing across the wall in front of them. They have never known that these shadows are due to figures near the entrance to the cave moving behind them in front of a candle. To these men, the shadows are reality. One day one of the men turns around and sees that there are figures moving behind him casting their shadows across the wall. From that day on, the "reality" of the shadows no longer exists. Reality is now defined as the figures that one sees outside the cave. We might view cognitive therapy as the attempt to get the patient to unchain himself and see outside the cave. Plato's philosophy was the search for "ideal forms" or qualities-whether Socrates spoke of geometry, love, justice, or political structure. The Platonists believed that these ideal forms were innate to the human mind and that one only needed to "educate" (that is, draw it out of the mind) through questioning. Truth and reality were entirely determined by the Platonic ideals. Socrates attempted to demonstrate this in one of the dialogues by asking a series of directed questions of an uneducated man about the principles of geometry. From these questions Socrates demonstrated that the "ideals" of geometry were already innate, but only had to be extracted through questioning (Cornford, 1957).. The idea that "reality is determined by cognition" has a long history in Western philosophy. For example, Kant's (1782/1988) philosophy of mind was based on the view that reality is never directly knowable, but rather is "known" through "categories of thinking". Some of these "categories" are viewed as innate-prior to experience: for example, categories of quantity, intensity, cause and effect. According to Kant, all knowledge was based on the "categories" (which today we would call schemas). Consequently, reality was never directly knowable-we only knew the schemas. British empiricists rejected Kant's idea of innate categories and argued that our understanding of reality was simply a matter of "associations" of events. Thus, if we saw that two events occurred together we might correctly or incorrectly conclude that one was a cause of the …