Jeffrey Young

Jeffrey E. Young built schema therapy, an extension of cognitive therapy aimed at the durable patterns people carry out of childhood rather than at a single episode of low mood. Born in 1950, he studied at Yale and then did postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania under Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, who later supplied the foreword to Young's best known popular title. Reinventing Your Life, written with the psychologist Janet S. Klosko and first published in 1993, puts that clinical model into ordinary language. It names eleven recurring patterns the authors call lifetraps, gives a short self-test for each, and sets out steps for working against them without medication or open-ended therapy. Young directs the Schema Therapy Institute and the Cognitive Therapy Center of New York, and has taught in the psychiatry department at Columbia University. The professional companion volume, Schema Therapy: A Practitioner's Guide, appeared in 2003 with Klosko and Marjorie E. Weishaar as co-authors.