ABSTRACT
Over the last quarter century critiques and reformulations of cognitive therapy have brought about major shifts in understanding and practice. Although the earliest models of treatment privileged a rationalist epistemology and objectivist conceptions of truth, exemplified in the classical approaches of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, contemporary thinkers have increasingly come to emphasize the active properties of mind and the constructive nature of knowing. Over the course of development, scholars propose, we establish mental structures or schemata that mediate our experience of emotion, meaning, and action, encompassing what we understand as our assumptive worlds, beliefs and attitudes, personal narratives, and patterns of thought. In this chapter I review the intellectual traditions that have shaped the cognitive paradigm, outlining rationalist, constructivist, and integrative models of intervention, and explore the ways in which concepts of therapeutic action deepen our understanding of core processes believed to bring about change and growth. In doing so I show how recent developments in the science of mind deepen our appreciation of essential concerns in therapeutic action in accord with the principles and values of clinical pragmatism.
