Although I would agree that it is useful to be able to see problems from multiple perspectives, even if you are just doing cognitive behavioral case conceptualizations and therapy there are still a number of different ways of formulating a case and intervening. Revising your formulation doesn't necessarily meaning changing the lens you use to look through, just the way you look through that lens. For example, a formulation of patient with depression - you may start off noting that there is a lack of pleasurable activities in the patient's life and encourage the patient to schedule more activities. This doesn't work. The patient doesn't do the homework you suggest either. You may then reformulate the problem as avoidance maintaining the problem, and the lack of homework completion being further evidence of this. You may then shift focus to working on the avoidance, trying to understand what thoughts and feelings go with and and task more manageable behavior experiments where the patient is tasked to do things s/he may otherwise avoid. If the next time the patient cancels, you may reformulate again - is this another manifestation of avoidance or is there something else going on - hostility towards the therapist, secondary gain maintaining illness, etc. You may then call the patient to find out what is going on. The patient reports not having done the tasks discussed in therapy. S/he reports feelings of shame and being a failure. You may acknowledge these feelings and validate the patient's emotional state and say that perhaps the work was too difficult. She then attends the following week and you may begin to look at these core beliefs that she is a failure, and feelings of having disappointed the therapist. You may examine the automatic negative thoughts and try and challenge the assumptions that come from it. You learn the patient's mother was depressed and when the patient was a child she would tell her that she needed to please others, especially men otherwise she would be alone. The therapist (male) again reformulates the patient and notes that avoidance in the sessions come from these deeply held beliefs and fears that she will disappoint the therapist and he will abandon her leaving her alone. When these thoughts and feelings are explored, validated, and challenged, the patient feels more comfortable, and is able to continue within therapy, engages in the homework, and eventually improves.
CBT is not one approach but includes lots of different techniques including behavior activation, exposure/response prevention, monitoring, reinforcement, socratic questioning, looking at reasoning biases and dysfunctional beliefs, examining core beliefs, using relaxation, hypnosis, mindfulness, imagery, metaphor, storytelling, focusing on behaviors within the therapy and exploring the client-therapist relationship, radical acceptance, willingness, cognitive defusion etc etc. There are many different approaches and ways of seeing within this. Although CBT therapists assiduously avoid all discussion of transference and countertransference, good therapists certainly do identify these elements and do transference work though the may not refer to it as such. The best example is probably in functional analytic psychotherapy.
Because CBT is typically cursorily taught in the vast majority of psychiatry residencies, and because they often train up people do CBT-lite using basic interventions, I think people forget that you can indeed use a cognitive-behavioral model to make complex formulations to help guide treatment are there are many different approaches within CBT that are being developed. Jacqueline Persons has written a great book on this (and there are others). It is a shame formulation is often wedded to psychodynamic as there are many other levels of formulating.
