For years, cognitive behaviorism has been a self-proclaimed leader in psychotherapy, citing numerous studies to back that claim. Its list of “evidence-based” applications has grown so broad that you’d think it’d cure all that ails you. Like other movements, it has tended to overreach its utility by trying to be all things to all people. We can gain perspective, though, by placing cognitive behaviorism in its cultural context. In doing so, we can better appreciate both its promises and its limitations in resolving particular problems of living. This exploration will allow cognitive behaviorism to assume its rightful place among other approaches to life’s adversities. We can then apply its strategies and techniques to the appropriate situations. Likewise, we may find that other therapeutic approaches are more relevant for other circumstances.

The  Broader Historical Background

Beginning with the Renaissance, Western culture has moved from a faith-based to a science-based view of reality. One profound trigger for this shift occurred when Copernicus and Galileo challenged Christian orthodoxy by proposing a heliocentric universe. The entire culture appeared knocked off balance by the idea that the Earth revolved around the sun. he changes in perspective have been so profound that conventional thinking has been questioned. In doing so, our civilization has developed a bias for an objective perspective toward our world. Philosophy has reflected this movement, with its schools of rationalism, empiricism, and skepticism.

This shift has fostered the Industrial Revolution, with its unprecedented advances in science and technology. However, the objectivity of science has been less beneficial in understanding and improving the human condition.

We have witnessed such a drift toward objectivity in the emerging field of psychology. Here, the scientific method works fairly well in analyzing human behavior, but less so in understanding human experience. This has led to the developing school of behavioral psychology, with its emphasis on publicly verifiable data. Eventually, some behaviorists recognized that private experience offered some benefit toward understanding human activity. This realization spawned the school of cognitive behaviorism. While it delved into the realm of subjective experience, this movement still retained an objective bias in analyzing it. More recent developments within this approach have struck a more equal balance in considering both behavior and experience in seeking an understanding of the human condition. This post will explore this evolution in more detail.

Logical Empiricism

The emergence of logical empiricism reflects this growing objectivity within philosophy. This approach is not so much a philosophy of life as it is a philosophy of science, with its primary focus on knowledge rather than values or principles. With its inquiry into epistemology, our quest for knowledge, it evolved as a philosophy of science. This approach views knowledge as being accrued through applying principles of logic to shared sensory data. From this perspective, personal experiences are not to be trusted unless they can be validated by others. The logical empiricists considered metaphysical constructs non-sensory, (or nonsense?), and thus unworthy subjects for philosophical or scientific analysis.       This was in contrast to other schools of philosophy, with their focus on  values or principles.

Psychology’s Break from Philosophy

Psychology has bought into this objective bias through adopting an experimental methodology for establishing knowledge. Still, much of the subject of this inquiry was private experience, which was ascertained by simply asking about it. It designed controlled experiments to demonstrate the cause-and-effect relationships between various abstract factors. This field of study thus broke from philosophy by emulating the rigors of the natural sciences, perhaps to attain cultural legitimacy.

Enter the Behavioral School of Psychology

The behavioral school evolved a more rigorous methodology, with its emphasis on observable data and verifiable findings. Behavioral psychology follows this approach in utilizing a linear, cause-and-effect analysis by focusing on behaviors as conditioned responses to stimulus situations. Private sensory experience, since it could not be externally validated, was considered irrelevant. The mind was thus considered a “black box,” something that either could not be penetrated through our understanding, or that did not offer any explanatory benefits. Case studies  fell out of favor, often dismissed as subjective anecdotes, lacking in validity. With  this emphasis on objectivity, behavioral psychology has largely relegated the study of the complexities of the human experience to the arts and humanities.

The Emergence of Cognitive Behaviorism

Cognitive behaviorism, perhaps the prevailing model of psychotherapy for our time, has its roots in behaviorism. This approach is not so much a philosophy of life as it is a philosophy of science, with its primary focus on knowledge rather than values or principles. Cognitive behaviorism, though, reintroduced private experience as a legitimate object of inquiry, yet it still maintained the emphasis on logic. In particular, it posited irrational beliefs as the primary source for psychological distress. Thus, it rediscovered the experiences of the subject and assessed the validity of the subject’s interpretations or conclusions about those experiences, based on the standards of logic and reason.

CBT’s  Challenge in the Larger Historical Context

In assuming this approach, it was extending the challenge that the Age of Reason posed to the Age of Faith from the broad cultural level down to the individual level. In this case, rather than challenging the dogmas of religion, as Copernicus and Galileo had done in displacing the earth from the center of the universe, cognitive behaviorists were analyzing and challenging the idiosyncratic belief systems of the various individuals seeking their aid and counsel.

Objectivity vs. Subjectivity

Note that cognitive behaviorism is based on the primacy of objective reality, which tends to be equated with the external reality and has the connotation of being impartial, neutral, factual and absolute, whereas the subjective viewpoint is often judged to be biased, arbitrary, relative, and idiosyncratic. This perspective is usually implicitly assumed, such that other plausible viewpoints are not considered. For example, one might view objectivity and subjectivity as two contrasting modes of experiencing the world, rather than equating objectivity with the “real world out there.” Such is the motif of the realist and the romantic, or the pragmatist and the idealist, with our culture tending to value the former over the latter.

CBT’s Challenge to Freudian Psychology

A contextual review of the historical development of cognitive behaviorism would not be complete without reference to Freudian psychoanalysis, a prevailing model of psychotherapy from a previous era. Freud and his followers had upset Victorian sensibilities by introducing human sexuality into their lecture halls, consulting rooms and social parlors, thus creating considerable unease in polite society.

CBT’s Challenge to Freudian Psychology

Behaviorism did not challenge the Freudian psychodynamic model on the grounds of its emphasis on sexuality per se, but rather for its use of various metaphysical constructs (e.g., libido, the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, the unconscious), suggesting that they were so abstract and removed from the basic sensory experience of daily life that they could be neither proven nor refuted. Thus, behaviorism did not so much disprove Freudian psychodynamics as it relied upon the standards of logical empiricism to dismiss the case on procedural grounds. In this way, cognitive behaviorism was able to sanitize the animal nature in the human condition without getting its hands dirty.

Irrationality and Distress

That still left the realm of the emotions to address, since clients were seeking therapy and counseling, not to correct their irrational belief systems, but rather, to alleviate the pain and suffering they were experiencing. While the Freudian psychodynamic model views emotions as a manifestation of frustrated instinctual drives, cognitive behaviorism considers distressing emotions as byproducts of irrational belief systems.

An Alternative Perspective

Now, where am I going with this review? What’s my angle? You might note my domain name is roguepsychologist, and wonder what I am up to. And you would be right! In placing a perspective within a cultural context, we recognize its relativity – its place among others, and thus its limitations. Such is my strategy in challenging the position of cognitive behaviorism as the prevailing model of psychotherapy. And I would not be exerting such energy in this endeavor if I did not have my own perspective to set forth. And in doing so, I would pose the following question: what if the structure of our reality were not logical and rational? What if it were paradoxical, instead? And if so, how might we engage it, not in the most reasonable way, but in the most enriching manner?

For Further Exploration . . .

If these questions appeal to you, you may want to review my overview of the website, entitled About “A Rogue Psychologist’s Field Guide to the Universe” on the front page of this site, or explore a somewhat more detailed account for this quest in Beyond Rationality and into the Realm of Paradox.  I have now added two other pages, entitled Living Rationally with Paradox:  Keeping Sane in a Crazy World, or Trying to Fit a Round Peg into a Square Hole? and Muddling Down a Middle Path: Wading through the Messiness of Life, which explore this issue in more depth.