Donald Robertson Quote on Judgment: The Stoic Roots of CBT

Quote

"The judgment is the target: the Stoic correction of the judgment is the ancestor of the cognitive therapy, and the person who has learned to examine the thoughts has learned the beginning of the freedom." — Donald Robertson, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor (2019)

Author

Donald Robertson is a British cognitive behavioral psychotherapist and the author of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor (2019), the book that demonstrated the connection between the Stoic therapy and the modern CBT.

Source

The quotation is from How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2019).

Context

The teaching belongs to the demonstration that runs through the book: the Stoic therapy of the emotions is the ancestor of the modern cognitive therapy. The ancient insight — "it is not the things themselves that disturb us, but our judgments about them" — is the foundation of the CBT: the emotions are the products of the beliefs, and the therapy is the correction of the beliefs. Robertson, the psychotherapist, reads the practice of Marcus Aurelius through the lens of the science, and the examination of the judgment is the center of both.

Meaning

The quotation states the connection between the Stoic therapy and the CBT with complete clarity. "The judgment is the target" — the identification: the judgment — the belief, the thought — is the target of the therapy, because the disturbance is the product of the judgment. "The Stoic correction of the judgment is the ancestor of the cognitive therapy" — the history: the ancient correction — the examination and the restructuring of the belief — is the ancestor of the modern cognitive technique. "The person who has learned to examine the thoughts has learned the beginning of the freedom" — the conclusion: the examination of the thoughts — the seeing of the thought as the thought, not as the fact — is the beginning of the freedom. The quotation is the modern form of the ancient insight of Epictetus, and it grounds the Stoic wisdom tradition's therapy in the language of the modern science.

Related Wisdom

The quotation belongs to the modern connection between Stoicism and CBT and the discipline of prosoche. Its account of the judgment as the target connects to the ancient insight of Epictetus and to the wider wisdom tradition's teaching on the examination of the thoughts.