Post-Rationalist Cognitive Therapy

Post-rationalist cognitive therapy is a type of constructivist cognitive therapy created by the Italian neuropsychiatrist Vittorio Guidano in the 1980s and 1990s. In the early 1980s Guidano and his colleague Giovanni Liotti published Cognitive Processes and Emotional Disorders (1983), still using the cognitive restructuring techniques of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck but adding their own theoretical model of evolutionary development from childhood, influenced by Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology and John Bowlby's attachment theory; this "evolutionary-structural" approach held that human beings form affective knowledge schemes from childhood, formed from attachment ties with parents or caregivers, that are more central than linguistic propositional knowledge schemes and bias how a person perceives the world, themselves and others. Guidano later incorporated Donald T. Campbell and Karl Popper's evolutionary epistemology, complex systems theory, Humberto Maturana's radical constructivism, and Jerome Bruner's narrative psychology. Unlike the cognitive therapies of Beck and Ellis, post-rationalist therapy's constructivist epistemology holds that the therapist has no superior access to reality than the patient and cannot simply identify and correct the patient's irrational thoughts; instead both patient and therapist are constructors of meaning who must reconstruct, over the course of a therapy that is historical in nature, the meanings of the patient's life situation and life history, with the therapist acting as a "strategically oriented disturber" who increases the patient's awareness of the tacit rules by which they organize experience rather than proposing a correct way of thinking.