ABSTRACT
Although it was not until the late 1960s and 1970s that experimental clinical psychologists started seriously to develop theories about the onset and maintenance of depression, even from these early theoretical writings there emerged a controversy about the necessity to postulate cognitive mediators. There are two forms of this debate, the first, with which we shall not be concerned here, is the philosophico-theoretical issue about the status of ‘private events’ and their explanatory power.
