Dr. Donald Meichenbaum - Academics

In the 1950s, behaviourism, the area of psychology which focuses entirely on behaviour and not at all on what happens in the brain, was the prevailing method in psychotherapy. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, the development of computers as a metaphor for the mind, along with some interesting findings by Jean Piaget, Noam Chomsky and others stemmed the area of psychology that deals with attention, memory, concept-formation, and problem solving: cognitive psychology.

The "Cognitive Revolution", as it was called, sparked new interest in psychological disorders and how to treat them. In 1977 Dr. Meichenbaum published Cognitive-behavior Modification: An Integrative Approach, a technique which puts patients in charge of their own psychotherapy by modifying what they say to themselves - their so-called 'inner dialogue'.