This research examines the development of the cognitive-behavioral approach to counseling. The research will establish a knowledge base for this approach by setting forth the historical and cultural context in which the discipline emerged as a counseling specialty and describe its evolution from metaphysical discourse to psychological praxis, showing the impact that its techniques and applications have had on the field of counseling. As well, the research will cite principal theoretical and practical features of cognitive-behavioral counseling, with a view toward clarifying how this particular mode of counseling fits into the larger picture of counseling and assessing its utility and value.
While undoubtedly every modern approach to counseling, including the cognitive-behavioral approach, owes a debt to Freudian theory, theories of cognitive and behavioral capacity have been present in pre-Freudian philosophical discourse and remain relevant to current practitioner discourse as well. Cognitive theory is linked to questions of the source of human consciousness, which has long been an issue of metaphysical discourse. Descartes is the source one of the most famous articulations of cognition (cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am/exist). The Cartesian view of human consciousness merges with his view of tangible reality, with existence being a property solely of the mind: I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing; that is, a mind . . . or reason . . . a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses (Descartes, 1993, pp. 65-6). Ideas, for Descartes, are innate, and if they come from outside the mind--i.e., are a part of sensory perception or "extension," they cannot be trusted. Indeed, doubt, as an activity of the mind, is more real than material reality and fully expresses the self. Ego and existence are contained by the mind, and no reality is complete unless absorbed b...