Twenty-one seconds to Nirvana: a Hegelian critique of cognitive-behavioral therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy is not only the most widely practiced form of therapy in the world, but its treatment methods—particularly mindfulness—have come to saturate self-help literature, human resource departments, and military training programs. I argue that despite its pretensions to scientificity, there is reason to think that CBT has become an ideology. I make this argument by returning to the two founding sources of second-wave CBT—Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck—to show that the core of CBT lies in a revitalization of a Stoic theory of subjectivity. From here, I argue that while Ellis and Beck find inspiration in Stoicism’s theory of emotions, they both miss the teleological metaphysics underlying Stoicism’s therapeutic project. Drawing on Hegel’s reading of Stoicism, I argue that this elision leads CBT to reproduce the same problem of empty formalism that plagued Roman Stoicism, leaving it susceptible to ideological co-option.