We are delighted to invite professionals from all therapeutic schools to a conversation with Judith Beck, one of the most important and figures in CBT today and has enormous impact on the field of psychotherapy beyond CBT.

Dr. Beck is the primary developer of Beck Institute’s core online courses, which have now been taken by health and mental health professionals in over 130 countries. First created in 2015, and extensively revised in 2021, these core comprehensive courses changed the landscape of mental health training worldwide.

Her father Aaron T. Beck, the founder of CBT, made no efforts to encourage her to follow his footsteps. But during her adolescence he checked out his ideas on his daughter who reassured him that "“They make good sense".

All methods of cognitive behavior therapy that originated from Beck's model treatment is based on a cognitive formulation, the core beliefs and behavioral approaches that describe a specific disorder.  The therapist pursues in a variety of techniques to create cognitive change – modification in the patient's thinking and belief system – to bring about lasting emotional and behavioral change.

Beck specializes in explaining the moment-to-moment decisions cognitive therapists make during therapy sessions. What may appear to be an intuitive process of decision making is based on a continuous ongoing conceptualization of patients, their diagnosis, and their experience of the therapy session.

Throughout her writings Beck delineates the typical problems that thwart the progress of CBT and discourage therapist and patient alike. Among therapists' obstacles are: an erroneous diagnosis, an incorrect formulation or conceptualization of the case, a failure to use one’s formulation of the case and conceptualization of the patient to guide therapy, a faulty treatment, a rift in the therapeutic alliance, an inadequate list of behavioral goals, incorrect implementation of techniques, inappropriate homework.

In this conversation we will discuss with Judith Beck: what can help therapists to overcome the above obstacles? how to optimize the management of therapeutic process? How CBT therapists treats personality disorders? How CBT therapists deal with patients that insist they cannot change or that therapy cannot help them?

We will also discuss what she thinks about the world of psychotherapy today, the third wave of CBT and a possible integration between CBT and psychoanalysis.

 

Judith S. Beck, PhD, is President of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy (BI), a nonprofitorganization that provides state-of-the-art training and certification in Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) to individuals and organizations, offers online courses on a variety of CBT topics, conducts research, and serves as a leading global resource in CBT. She is also Clinical Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, where she teaches CBT to psychiatric residents. Dr. Beck divides her time among administration, supervision and teaching, clinical work, curriculum development, research, and writing. She has been a consultant for several National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) studies, has developed widely-adopted assessment scales for children and adolescents, and has made hundreds of presentations nationally and internationally on various applications of CBT.

Dr. Beck oversees all programmatic offerings at Beck Institute, ensuring the content is current, relevant, and appropriately adapted to meet the needs of trainees around the world. Dr. Beck also spearheaded the development of Beck Institute’s CBT Certification Program, ensuring that Beck Institute certified clinicians are practicing with fidelity to the model developed and tested in over 2,000 clinical trials.

She has also written extensively on a cognitive behavioral approach to weight management. Dr. Beck maintains a clinical caseload at the Beck Institute’s in-house clinic in suburban Philadelphia, treating clients who experience a range of challenges.