Aaron Beck turned the world of psychiatry upside down

BY FAR THE youngest of Aaron Beck’s subjects, in the very partial list of patients he had treated for anxiety and phobias in his book, “Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders” (1976), was an eight-year-old boy. This boy, after weeks in hospital with near-fatal septicaemia, became horribly squeamish about blood, and the smell of ether would make him faint. How was he treated? By learning, whenever he felt faint, to focus on other things, even just naming all America’s presidents in the right order. The feelings still followed him into adulthood, but he then confronted them head-on: by going to Yale Medical School, where the smell of ether was more or less infused in the walls.