ABSTRACT
Aaron Beck has been an unusual ®gure in the therapy world in that he has combined the roles of a major theoretician and researcher with that of a gifted practitioner. He has stressed the importance of ensuring a strong development of these three elements during the development of cognitive therapy. The only aim of his research and theoretical work was to secure an effective treatment model for clients, and at no time did he take time out of one sphere in order to develop in another. He appears to have juggled the three balls relentlessly throughout. The only period of `sabbatical' that I have been able to ®nd was when he spent some time in Oxford and wrote his book on couple work (Beck, 1988). This is an interesting point because in talking about this period, Beck said that it allowed him to address some of his critics who had made the point that cognitive therapy did not have much to say about relationships. This effort also nailed another criticism ± that cognitive therapy was only interested in emotions de®ned as symptoms by the DSM (Padesky & Beck, 1990). The resulting book is interesting in that it is distinctly less `clinical' than many of his other publications and perhaps gives an interesting insight into how
the, at ®eld to see gets the people sometimes say of surgeons, `surgeons do like doing surgery', but one feels that Beck would not ful®l the unspoken second part of this sentence ± `whether people need surgery or not!'
