Stoicism and Modern Psychology

When the founders of modern cognitive therapy reached back for a precedent, they found it in a former Roman slave. The claim that our distress springs not from events themselves but from our judgements about them, first worked out by the Stoics, sits close to the heart of cognitive behavioural therapy, now among the most researched and widely practised psychological treatments in the world. This article traces that lineage carefully: the shared core idea, the specific debts that the pioneers of cognitive therapy acknowledged, the therapeutic techniques that echo Stoic exercises, and, just as important, the real differences between a clinical treatment and a philosophy of life.

At the centre of both traditions lies a single observation. Between an event and our emotional response to it sits an interpretation, a judgement, and it is largely the judgement, rather than the event, that determines how we feel. Epictetus put it in a line that has echoed down the centuries: people are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about things. He illustrated it with the observation that death itself is not terrible, since if it were it would have seemed so to Socrates; what is terrible is the opinion that death is terrible.

This is, in essence, the cognitive model of emotion. It implies that if our interpretations drive our feelings, then by examining and revising those interpretations we can change how we feel. That implication is the engine of cognitive therapy, and it is also the engine of the Stoic discipline of assent. The two traditions arrive, by very different routes, at the same practical conclusion: work on the judgement, and the emotion will follow.

The debt is not a matter of later speculation; the pioneers said so themselves. Albert Ellis, who in the 1950s developed an approach now known as rational emotive behaviour therapy, repeatedly credited Epictetus as a forerunner and quoted that very line about opinions to his patients and readers. Ellis built his method around a simple scheme he called the ABC model. An activating event, A, does not directly cause an emotional consequence, C. Between them lies B, a belief about the event, and it is the belief, often irrational, that produces the distress.

The parallel with the Stoic sequence of impression, assent and impulse is close enough to be unmistakable, and Ellis did not pretend otherwise. His therapeutic work consisted largely in helping people identify the rigid, exaggerated beliefs feeding their distress, the demands that things must go a certain way, the catastrophic readings of ordinary setbacks, and to dispute and revise them. A Stoic would recognise the activity at once as the examination of impressions, conducted in a clinic rather than a classroom.

Around the same period, working independently, the psychiatrist Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy, which would grow into the broad family of treatments known as cognitive behavioural therapy. Beck observed that people in distress are subject to automatic thoughts, rapid and often unnoticed interpretations that colour their experience, and to systematic biases in those thoughts, which he called cognitive distortions: jumping to catastrophic conclusions, reading minds, painting in black and white, generalising from a single instance.

His therapy taught people to notice these automatic interpretations, to test them against the evidence, and to replace distorted ones with more accurate appraisals, a procedure known as cognitive restructuring. Stated in those terms, the kinship with Stoicism is plain. The Stoic, too, holds that we are constantly struck by impressions carrying hasty value judgements, that these judgements are frequently false, and that the disciplined examination and revision of them is the path to a steadier mind. The cognitive distortion and the unexamined impression are close cousins, and cognitive restructuring is recognisably the discipline of assent in a modern, clinical key. The psychotherapist Donald Robertson has documented this historical lineage in detail, showing how directly the early cognitive therapists drew on the Stoic inheritance.

The resemblance runs deeper than the founding idea. A number of specific therapeutic techniques have clear Stoic forerunners.

The Stoic resonance is not confined to the original cognitive therapies. Later developments echo it too. Acceptance and commitment therapy places great weight on accepting what lies outside one’s control while committing to action guided by one’s deepest values, a pairing that maps strikingly onto the Stoic combination of accepting fate and acting from virtue. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, writing from his survival of the concentration camps, argued that the last of human freedoms is the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, a thought that stands very near to Epictetus’s claim that our judgements remain our own even when everything else is stripped away.

More broadly, the research traditions of positive psychology and resilience have repeatedly returned to themes the Stoics would recognise: the role of interpretation in wellbeing, the value of gratitude and perspective, the importance of meaning and of acting in line with one’s values. None of these fields is simply Stoicism in disguise, but each draws, knowingly or not, on the same deep insight into the place of judgement in the emotional life.

The parallels are real, but they can be overstated, and it is worth being clear about the differences. Cognitive behavioural therapy is a clinical treatment. Its aim is the relief of distress and the easing of specific difficulties such as anxiety or low mood; it is usually time-limited, delivered by a trained practitioner, and deliberately neutral about how a person ought to live their wider life. It borrows a method, the examination of judgements, without taking on any particular vision of the good.

Stoicism is something larger and more demanding. It is a complete philosophy of life, with an account of nature, a theory of virtue, a conception of our duties to one another, and a single goal, the flourishing life lived according to reason. Its therapy of the emotions is one part of a whole that also tells you what to aim at, how to treat other people, and how to understand your place in the world. The therapy took a technique from the philosophy; it did not, and did not try to, take the philosophy itself.

This difference matters in a practical way too. Stoic practice can be a genuine support for a steadier and more considered emotional life, but it is not a treatment for mental illness and not a replacement for professional care. Anyone struggling with serious or persistent distress is well served by both: the counsel of the ancients, and the help of a qualified practitioner.

Partly because of this kinship with psychology, Stoicism has undergone a notable revival in recent years. Scholars, therapists and writers have come together around a renewed interest in the ancient practices, studying them in their own right and testing them in modern life. Public events run each year invite anyone to take up a course of Stoic exercises for a week and reflect on the effect, and surveys gathered from these participants point to reported gains in wellbeing and life satisfaction, encouraging if not the last word on the matter.

What this revival suggests is that the old insight has not been used up. The cognitive therapies drew one technique from the Stoic well and put it to powerful use. The philosophy that technique came from remains, with much more still to offer anyone willing to take it up not as a treatment to be completed but as a way of living to be practised.

This article discusses mental health in a general and historical way. If you are dealing with persistent distress, please consider speaking with a qualified health professional, who can offer support suited to your situation.