There are hazards in offering a theory which claims to comprehend and integrate others. Psychotherapists, just as do professionals in others fields, have "intense loyalties to the schools they espouse" (Wender & Klein, 1981, p. 264). And contending schools in any field are greatly attached to their controversies; to offer to remove the cause of the controversy is to be in the position of a cop in a household dispute. The one matter that contending parties always can agree upon is that an outsider has nothing to contribute. Nevertheless, I step where angels professionally trained in particular `schools' of clinical therapy would be prudent enough not to tread. And not being the member of any `school' confers an advantage: Lack of socialization into, and absence of professional connection with, any particular school of therapy promotes breadth of thought and synthetic theory.

If you work at enough different tasks you sometimes experience the eerie and then exciting sensation that you have met the same idea before in another context. And so it is with many of the ideas in cognitive therapy, especially the types of thinking characteristic of depressed persons. The distortions of thought common to depressives are much the same, though with different names, as the obstacles to sound scientific knowledge faced by researchers, the logical fallacies that have been pointed out by philosophers through the ages, the devices used by propagandists to influence audiences, the causes of bias in estimates of probabilities, and many of the sources of faulty decision-making in business and other organizations. Once you recognize the similarity in these conceptual schemes, each one illuminates the others, and the overall scheme gains in generality.

Indeed, cognitive therapy has been moving toward greater use of concepts found in philosophy and other social sciences, some by borrowing but even more by independent invention. The analysis of logical and linguistic fallacies is a prime example of the bridge with philosophy. The utilization of the theory of information processing by Bowlby (1980) is another connection. Still another example is the employment (see Burns (1980, p. 150; Beck, 1987, p. 31) of such ideas from managerial economics as cost-benefit analysis, and supply of resources, and even the term "economy" with respect to the thinking mechanism. And the time is ripe for cognitive therapy to link up with decision theory, as studied in economics, psychology, political science and other fields.2 Cognitive therapy may eventually be the the first truly integrated social science.3

2.- An interesting connection is the "prospect theory" of Kahnemann and Twersky (1979). They find that people's evaluations of uncertain alternatives are best described as relative rather than absolute, in contrast to tahe assumption of expected-utility theory; this they explain in terms of perception theory, which fits with the discussion of comparisons in Chapter 3. Furthermore, they find that the common reference point is to the present state of affairs. This comparison scheme would seem to have appropriate properties for maximization of one's psychic well-being, in accord with discussion in this book of the appropriate choice of a benchmark-comparison state for a Rosy Mood Ratio, whereas expected-utility theory assumes that people will maximize their monetary wealth without reference to any particular state of affairs. In turn, the analysis given in this book should illuminate prospect theory by explaining why the prospect-theory form of utility function is held by people, and it suggests that the individual's utility function should be related to the individual's score on a depression inventory. And philosophers, psychologists, and economists have joined in exploring the logic and action of such mental mechanisms as "multiple selves", which fits with the practice of cognitive therapeutic techniques. (See Elster, 1986).

3.- My work in related cognitive fields -- economics, research methods, philosophy, and decision-making has dealt with a wider range of concepts than are traditionally available in clinical psychology. My experience with cognitive psychology and this set of subjects goes back to my undergradate thesis on concept formation in 1952-1953, and has continued with books and articles on each of these subjects mentioned above plus some others; each part of this experience has contributed to the conceptual scheme presented here. There are other remarks on this topic in Chapter 1.

Another aspect of cognitive therapy that one meets in other contexts: The dialogues between therapist and patient that Ellis and Beck and their colleagues conduct are identical in form to the Socratic form of dialogue used especially in law schools and also elsewhere in education. The back-and-forth between student and teacher is an attempt on the part of the teacher to have the student practice clearer thinking about the subject at hand, just as is the back-and-forth between therapist and patient.

Some Additional Theoretical Underpinning

Self-comparison is the link between cognition and emotion -- that is, between what you think and what you feel. This traditional joke highlights the nature of the mechanism: A salesman is a person with a shine on his shoes, a a smile on his face, and a lousy territory. So imagine yourself a saleswoman with a lousy territory.

You might first think: I'm more entitled to that territory than Charley is. You then feel anger, perhaps toward the boss who favored Charley. If your anger focuses instead on the person who has the other territory, the pattern is called envy.

But you might also think: I can, and will, work hard and sell so much much that the boss will give me a better territory. In that state of mind you simply feel a mobilization of your human resources toward attaining the object of the comparison.

Or instead you might think: There is no way that I can ever do anything that will get me a better territory, because Charley and other people sell better than I do. Or you think that lousy territories are always given to women. If so, you feel sad and worthless, the pattern of depression, because you have no hope of improving your situation.

Or you may think: I only have this lousy territory another week, after which I move to a terrific territory. Now you are shifting the comparison in your mind from a) your versus another's territory, to b) your territory now versus your territory next week. The latter comparison is not consistent with depression.

Or still another possible line of thought: No one else could put up with such a lousy territory and still make any sales at all. Now you are shifting from a) the comparison of territories, to b) the comparison of your strength with that of other people. Now you feel pride, and not depression.

Cognitive therapy dovetails with the recent broad movement toward regarding individuals as responsible for themselves rather than as being automatons of social forces. For example, this anti-authoritarian pro-freedom trend in thought appears in criminology's shift away from social causation in its view of how to reform criminals, and in economics' evidence that private property rights better motivate individuals to produce than do collective incentives. Whereas in traditional Freudian therapy the analyst is a father figure who always knows best, in cognitive therapy -- especially when carried out by oneself without a therapist -- the individual determines his or her own fate in cognitive-behavioral therapy.

next: Appendix B