Copyright © Donald J. Robertson 2024. All rights reserved.
How to Think Like Socrates, the follow-up to How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, is available to preorder in audiobook, hardback, and ebook formats, published by St. Martin’s Press. More information here.
It was from Socrates that Stoicism derived some of its most important ideas. The pioneers of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) frequently quote the famous saying of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus that “people are not upset by events but rather by their opinions about them.” The same idea can be found four centuries before Epictetus, though, in the Socratic dialogues. This basic insight into the nature of emotion leads us to the use of reason as a therapeutic technique, as it implies that we should question the assumptions that cause our distress, if we want to get better.
Many different techniques can be used to change our thoughts and beliefs—our “cognitions,” as psychologists call them. The goal of CBT, put simply, is to replace irrational and unhealthy cognitions with rational and healthy ones. One obvious way of doing that is by asking questions, such as:
- Where’s the evidence for that?
- What are the consequences of that way of looking at things?
- How might other people view that situation differently?
Aaron T. Beck, one of the founders of CBT, said that he initially came across this idea when he was studying Plato’s Republic for a college philosophy course. “Socratic questioning,” of this sort, later became a mainstay of his style of therapy. Countless research studies now show that cognitive therapy techniques of this kind, targeting dysfunctional beliefs, can help people suffering from clinical depression, anxiety disorders, and a host of other emotional problems.
As a young therapist in training, I was astounded, nevertheless, to come across ancient Greek dialogues where Socrates was doing something I can only describe as a precursor of cognitive therapy. He behaved like a relationship counselor or family therapist, at times, by helping his friends, and even his own family members, to resolve their interpersonal conflicts. I wondered why no one had ever told me that Socrates was doing cognitive psychotherapy, of sorts, nearly two and a half thousand years before it was supposedly invented.
On one occasion, for instance, Socrates’s teenage son, Lamprocles, was complaining about his notoriously sharp- tongued mother, the philosopher’s fiery young wife, Xanthippe. Socrates, it seemed to me, questioned his son in an incredibly skillful manner. He managed to get Lamprocles to concede that Xanthippe was actually a good mother, who genuinely cared for him. The boy insisted, however, that he still found her nagging completely intolerable. After some discussion, Socrates asked what struck me as an ingenious therapeutic question: Do actors in tragedies take offense when other characters insult and verbally abuse them? As Socrates remarked, they say things far worse than anything Xanthippe ever did.
Lamprocles thought it was a silly question. Of course they don’t take offense, but that’s because they know that despite appearances the other actors do not, in reality, mean them any harm! It’s just make-believe. That’s correct, replied Socrates, but didn’t you admit just a few moments earlier that you don’t believe your mother really means you any harm either?
I’ll leave you to mull this conversation over. I hope you notice how, with a few simple questions, Socrates helped Lamprocles to examine his anger from a radically different perspective. When assumptions that fuel our anger begin to seem puzzling to us, our thinking can become more flexible, and we may begin to break free from the grip of unhealthy emotions. What once seemed obvious, now seems uncertain. Indeed, the brief dialogue that takes place between them encapsulates one of the recurring themes of Socratic philosophy: How can we distinguish between appearance and reality in our daily lives?
Socrates exhibited a remarkable ability to carry out psychological therapy with problems as mundane as a teenage boy’s irritation toward his nagging mom, while raising much deeper philosophical questions. This fascinated me because, although CBT is certainly very effective, I noticed that many of my clients were left wanting more. Once you realize, for instance, that irrational beliefs play a bigger role in your emotional problems than you had previously assumed, what comes next? Could there be a whole philosophy of life based on, or at least consistent with, the fundamental insights of modern psychotherapy?
Socrates, like most ancient philosophers, saw the quest for wisdom and the promise of emotional well-being as two sides of the same coin. He insisted that the mission he undertook, in the name of Apollo, the god of healing, was not only philosophical but also therapeutic. His trademark method of questioning was intended as a remedy, to help cure us of a terrible problem: a form of intellectual conceit that blinds and confuses us with regard to our own values. We go through life, for the most part, acting as if we know— or don’t need to know— what our goal should be, which things are good and which are bad. Few of us ever take time to critically examine these assumptions.
The approach to self-improvement we find in the Socratic dialogues is therefore unlike that found in modern self-improvement or self-help literature. We usually get self-help advice from self-help books. What Socrates bequeathed to us was not so much a series of answers but rather a method of asking questions, a technique for clarifying our thinking and protecting ourselves from being misled by others, which is known today as the Socratic method.
Donald Robertsonis a cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist, and the author of several books on philosophy and psychotherapy. He is one of the founding members of Modern Stoicism, and the founder and president of the Plato’s Academy Centre nonprofit. His books include Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, and How to Think Like Socrates. He writes articles and publishes his podcast on Substack.
