Clinic & Therapy

At the end of this archive stands the question it was about all along: does this help anyone? Three files, three answers from practice. Beck noticed that his patients were not suffering from repressed drives but from sentences they said about themselves — and built from that the world’s most-tested psychotherapy. Ellis was there earlier, louder and rougher, and helped push the shift from interpreting to testing. Seligman found helplessness in the animal laboratory, made a model of depression from it, and revoked it himself fifty years later.

The three files lie closer to the present than any others in this house — and therefore carry the sharpest findings and the freshest disputes: efficacy evidence with thousands of patients, but also shrinking effects, publication-biased balances, and a professional entanglement that reached congressional inquiries.

For the archive the circle closes here: what Freud began in the consulting room is measured here — with control groups, preregistration, and the willingness to discard one’s own classic.