A teoria da personalidade na terapia congitiva de Aaron Beck

Abstract

This research aims to survey the Aaron Beck’s thesis about personality and analyse the state of the theory of personality in his approach. The theoretical framework of Cognitive Therapy is somewhat neglected and still has many gaps, especially in personality theory. To analyze the current state of this problem in the Cognitive Therapy, we first described some criteria of scientific theory and personality theory, and briefly present a discussion about the concept of personality and its theories. Later we described Beck's thesis from the models he showed throughout his work, the first of them, his model of depression, which was originally developed by Beck to explain and treat depressed patients.The second, the psychopathology model , in which the author proposes an expansion of the original theory to other psychiatric disorders with little change in the basic theoretical framework, and the third is the modal model, his recent theoretical proposal in which he presented and incorporated new concepts and hypotheses to the original theory. This model appears as an attempt to solve some problems in TC raised by Beck himself and by his critics. Finally, we evaluate the thesis found. We conclude that although Beck's thesis about personality are relevant and consistent, don't constitute a complete theory of personality, because of important gaps. The main of them refer to a lack of a theory of motivation and an explicit theory of nonpathological personality.