Читать книгу The Handy Psychology Answer Book - Lisa J. Cohen - Страница 37

Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Sephardic Jew living in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Now regarded as one of the first modern philosophers, he was excommunicated in 1656 from the Jewish community for what were then considered heretical writings. Spinoza believed our primary psychological drive to be the promotion and protection of our own wellbeing and survival, an idea that anticipated evolutionary psychology. He also believed our three primary emotions to be pleasure, pain, and desire, all of which signal the state of our wellbeing. This anticipated Freud’s pleasure principle. Finally, Spinoza taught that our cognitive appraisal of any situation will determine our emotional response. In other words, how we think about an event will shape how we feel about it. Therefore, we can change our emotions by changing our thoughts. This is the basic principle behind cognitive therapy, pioneered in the mid-twentieth century by Aaron Beck (1921-) and Albert Ellis (1913-2007).