Volume 19, Issue 1
For the Origin of a Misunderstanding: A comment on the name of cognitive therapy(ies)
Abstract
There is a revealing sign in the name of Cognitive Therapy to scan the conditions of its historical birth. Coinciding with the gradual discontent that the behaviorist approach caused in the theoretical field, and joining the shock - for some people revolution- which had broken out in the psychology of the basic processes in the early 60´s last century, a refreshing, interdisciplinary and restricted-not-only- to-psychology perspective arises, Cognitivism. As a consequence, the psycotherapeutic context got cognitivised. But, strictly, cognitive psychotherapy only adds a little tepid resonance of the constructo from which borrows the anticompartimentalist emblem. There is, of course, some weak support in computer's methaphor (and its philoanthropological implications on the back of its heuristic validity), but it is about some family resemblance rather than a clear property. To a certain extent, it could be asserted that the cognitive sort's clinic would exist without the experimental psichology conceptual support. As Rachman (1996) points, the relationship between the cognitive theory multidisciplinary field and the therapy put on its most psychological version has mainly been an expression of desire.
Keywords
basic processes, experimental psychology, mental representation, cognitive therapies