Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
The therapy built on the claim that thoughts cause feelings, so changing the thought changes the feeling. Distress runs on cognitive distortions — habitual errors of inference that make the world look worse than the evidence supports — and treatment consists of catching those thoughts, testing them against the evidence, and replacing them (feeling-good).
The lineage this wiki has: aaron-beck as its father and Albert Ellis as its grandfather; david-d-burns, trained by Beck, as the person who put it into four million households. Its founding move was negative, and aimed at the tradition that dominates the rest of this spoke — Beck concluded that Freudian psychoanalysis had no empirical support as a treatment for depression (sigmund-freud) and set out to build something that could be tested.
Why it matters to this corpus specifically
The spoke’s founding thesis is that the mind runs on structure its owner didn’t choose and can’t inspect. Almost every source here agrees and then stops: heuristics-and-biases finds the structure survives being explained to you, perceptual-learning finds it stable across learning, analytical-psychology locates it too deep to reach directly. the-middle-passage claims it can be dismantled and offers no way to check.
CBT makes the strongest claim available on the question and attaches a procedure to it: the distorting structure is accessible to inspection — write the thought down — and modifiable by argument. Whether the modification lasts and by what mechanism is where the interesting literature is, and none of it is in this wiki yet.
The line against ACT
acceptance-and-commitment-therapy was built partly in reaction to this. Both treat the relationship between thought and suffering as the target, and they prescribe opposite operations: CBT disputes the thought for accuracy; ACT changes the person’s relationship to it and treats disputing as another way of being entangled.
That disagreement now runs through most of this spoke. The instruction “welcome the symptom” is stated by three separate traditions (the-middle-passage, existential-psychotherapy, in-the-absence-of-the-ordinary) and CBT is the corpus’s clearest statement of the opposite: the symptom is an error, and the work is to correct it. Both sides come with trial counts — 900+ for ACT, a large and older literature for CBT — and this wiki holds a source assessing the quality of neither.
Cognitive distortions
The book’s operational core is a named list of inference errors a reader learns to recognize in their own writing — all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filtering, mind-reading, catastrophizing, and others. This wiki does not have the list from a source that enumerates it (feeling-good arrived via an encyclopedia summary and a bookseller’s page), so no page here should quote one as authoritative until a primary source lands.
Related
feeling-good · aaron-beck · david-d-burns · acceptance-and-commitment-therapy · sigmund-freud · replication-crisis · synthesis