I learned today that Albert Ellis (or Big Al as I and a few friends fondly referred to him) is dead. Apparently he died on 24 July, 2007, of natural causes. He was 93. I feel both relieved about, and saddened by, his passing. To be perfectly honest, I felt that in his latter years he was something of an embarrassment - although there was a kind of logic to what he was doing, it seemed to be undermining the reputation of some of his earlier work.
My one and only face-to-face encounter with him was one evening in 2003, when with some friends, I attended one of his famous Friday evening open therapy sessions in New York, where members of the public were invited on stage to share their problems and experience his practice of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT).
Albert Ellis had invented REBT in 1953. He had a doctorate in clinical psychology and was a practicing psychoanalyst from 1947 to 1953. However, he became increasingly doubtful about the effectiveness of traditional psychotherapy. He began to argue that no amount of talk would help his clients if they failed to take action against their habitual thoughts, feelings, and actions. By late 1953, he had stopped calling himself a psychoanalyst and began developing Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), an action-oriented therapy aimed at making emotional and behavioural change through challenging self-defeating thoughts.
Today REBT is recognised as a pioneering approach to psychotherapy and one of the foundations of all modern cognitive behavior therapies. In 2003, the American Psychological Association named Albert Ellis as the second most influential psychologist of the twentieth century, second only to Carl Rogers.
My encounter with Albert Ellis in 2003 was both tragic and comic. It seemed tragic because the octogenarian was profoundly deaf and was conducting a “therapy session” by shouting at the client, and by having people shout back to him down a microphone. However, it wasn’t the deafness that was the real tragedy. Throughout his life Albert Ellis had been a rebel and had genuinely believed that people were held back by “crazy” beliefs that made them dysfunctional in some way. Books titles (and he published over 78) such as “Sex Without Guilt” and “The Myth of Self-Esteem” may give a flavour of the man. By his late eighties, he definitely appeared to show little concern for more gentle human graces, and the shouting just exaggerated the loudness of his eccentricity. As I watched the spectacle, I had to remind myself that this was the man who decades earlier had written the wonderfully wise and beautifully crafted “Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy” which had had a profound and lasting influence on my practice as a therapist.
The evening was comic because of its absurdity. I had brought some friends with me who were not therapists in the hope that they might glimpse something of the kind of work that I did. But despite the outward structure of a therapy session, the evening really was a farce. People came forward and poured out their painful lives, only to have to repeat themselves with increasing volume, and then listen to the Albert’s shouting, while the latest attractive female assistant moved the microphone around and then shouted at him too. The final straw, that reduced us to tears of laughter in our taxi back to the hotel (and which we still today cannot mention together without dissolving) was when Albert encouraged a young man to express his feelings about the way he had been badly treated by his parents. The therapist clearly didn’t think the man was really expressing his true feelings, or at least, he wasn’t expressing them with enough precision and force. As the man refused to swear of say the “f**k” work, Albert encouraged him to replace the offending word with “fish”. The choice was to bite our fists or be ejected because of irreverence in Albert’s shrine (the Albert Ellis Institute) as the young man spoke with great feeling about his “fishing parents” and “what the fish he felt”.
Although Albert Ellis developed REBT as a carefully schematic mode of therapy, a lot of his early thinking was influenced by the Greek philosopher, Epicetus. Epicetus had been a slave and had then regained his freedom. When he taught philosophy he was someone who had experienced extreme difficulty, injustice, and powerlessness in his own life. Like Viktor Frankl surviving in a Nazi concentration camp, Epicetus knew all about keeping sane in the face of real suffering. One of the cornerstones of his philosophy was: “Men are not moved by things but by the views which they take of them.” Ellis developed this to help twentieth century clients who were disturbed by the events and things in their lives, encouraging them to re-frame and to find other interpretations. Ellis’s critics accused him of being superficial, but many of them never really understood that REBT wasn’t just about cognitive change, but was concerned with helping people to change their behaviour and feeling as well.
When thinking about death, Epicetus wrote: “Above all, remember that the door stands open. Be not more fearful than children; but as they, when they weary of the game, cry, ‘I will play no more,’ even so, when thou art in the like case, cry, ‘I will play no more’ and depart.” Big Al has departed.
[...] Albert Ellis, a cognitive therapist, cited by the American Psychological Association in 2003 as the second most influential psychologist in the twentieth century, used to argue that most people had strong tendencies to be like seagulls. As a psychotherapist he was quite unusual in his methods and often did and said seemingly extreme things in order to make a point or to help his clients remember key things. And humour was a regular tool. [...]
I found this reading very amusing. I am one of a group of five in a begining Psychology class whos job it is to research and present information on Albert Ellis. What I have read thus far leaves me pleased to have been assigned this intelligent and wonderfully entertaining man.
[...] Albert Ellis, a cognitive therapist, cited by the American Psychological Association in 2003 as the second most influential psychologist in the twentieth century, used to argue that most people had strong tendencies to be like seagulls. As a psychotherapist he was quite unusual in his methods and often did and said seemingly extreme things in order to make a point or to help his clients remember key things. And humour was a regular tool. [...]