Aaron T. Beck

Aaron Temkin Beck was born July 18, 1921, and spent his career as a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. His departure from psychoanalytic tradition came through cognitive therapy — later cognitive behavioral therapy — which treated clinical depression and anxiety by training patients to identify and challenge distorted thinking. He built the tools to measure what he treated: the Beck Depression Inventory became a standard instrument for gauging depression's severity. Beck published more than 600 journal articles and 25 books on psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide, an…