“Freud was full of horseshit”. These are the words of Albert Ellis, co-founder of CBT and originator of what he calls Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT). Continue reading
Tag Archives: Therapy
A Critique of CBT as Ideology (Part 1)
What follows in the next few posts is a longish essay on CBT as the dominant force within applied psychology, and its place as an ideology which supports various practices of domination.The length of this essay is unwieldy for a blog format, so I have broken the piece into sub-sections, which I will publish one at a time, before eventually assembling the piece into pdf form. As ever, discussion is welcome.
The structure of the piece is as follows:
1. Cleaning the Augean Stables
2. The Founding of CBT,and Beck’s Foundational Errors
3. Psychology, Epistemology, and CBT
3a. A Note on Psychometrics
4. The Ethics and Politics of Intervention
4a. Two Brief Case Studies in Biopolitics
5. Project for an Unscientific Psychology
- Cleaning the Augean Stables
It seems to me an urgent task to critique the dominant ideology which has psychology in its grasp, namely Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy (CBT). As a general rule of thumb, whenever one sees an acronym in psychotherapy, one can assume the presence of glib, corporate-friendly pseudo-scientific pap, and that is entirely the case here. However, unlike NLP, for instance, (I do not mention more popular doctrines, but I mean them), CBT is taken seriously by many clinicians and patients alike. Despite numerous signs of its weakening, CBT remains strong where it is most influential, namely, in academia, third-party payers, and among regulators. Continue reading