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UNIT FIFTEEN TEXT ONE Albert Ellis, who died last month at age 93, believed that psychotherapy should be short term, goal oriented, and efficient; his method, introduced in 1955 and now known as rational emotive behavior therapy, is one of the foundations of todays cognitive-behavioral therapy. The theory: Irrational ways of thinking underlie most psychological conditions, and patients can get better by tackling these skewed thinking patterns, correcting them, and developing new ones. In a 2006 survey of social workers and psychologists conducted by Psychotherapy Networker in partnership with Joan Cook, an adjunct assistant professor of medical psychology at Columbia University, over 60 percent said that they employ cognitive-behavioral techniques in their work. What cognitive therapy does is focus on the present, says Judith Beck, director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research outside Philadelphia. Beck is the daughter of Aaron Beck, who developed his own form of cognitive-behavioral therapy, simply called cognitive therapy, in the early 1960s when he was a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania. Rather than exploring in depth the issues surrounding a patients childhood, dreams, past relationships, and life experiences—essential in Freudian psychoanalysis—the short-term cognitive approach focuses on developing skills the patient can use to have a better week. Cognitive therapists may go into those deeper issues if necessary, but the goal is not insight alone but also practical problem solving and symptom reduction, says Beck. Techniques used to that end may include weighing evidence to evaluate whether a patients self-image is skewed, developing a more realistic worldview, prioritizing problems, and setting an agenda for dealing with them. According to research by Aaron Beck and others, cognitive therapy is as effective as antidepressants in initially treating mild, moderate, and severe depression, and patients who had used cogni