Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

Feeling Good grew out of dissatisfaction with conventional Freudian treatment of depression. Burns’s mentor, Aaron T. Beck (considered the “father” of cognitive therapy; Albert Ellis is considered the “grandfather”), concluded that there was no empirical evidence for the success of Freudian psychoanalysis in treating depressed people. The idea that negative feelings such as depression and anxiety are triggered by thoughts or perceptions has a long history, dating back to the Greek philosopher Epictetus, who said that people are disturbed not by things but by the way we think about them.