Dr. Albert Ellis
LaMarr
July 24, 2007
Albert Ellis, Who Streamlined Freud, Dies at 93
By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
Albert Ellis, whose streamlined, confrontational approach to
psychotherapy made him one of the most influential and provocative
figures in modern psychology, died early today at his home in an
apartment above the institute he founded Manhattan. He was 93. The
cause was kidney and heart failure, said a friend and associate, Gayle
Rosellini.
Dr. Ellis (he had a doctorate but not a medical degree) called his
approach rational emotive behavior therapy, or R.E.B.T. Developed in
the 1950's, it challenged the deliberate, slow-moving methodology of
Sigmund Freud, the prevailing psychotherapeutic treatment at the time.
Where the Freudians maintained that a painstaking exploration of
childhood experience was critical to understanding neurosis and curing
it, Dr. Ellis believed in short-term therapy that called on patients
to focus on what was happening in their lives at the moment and to
take immediate action to change their behavior. Neurosis, he said, was
"just a high-class word for whining."
"The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you feel better," he
told The New York Times in an interview in 2004. "But you don't get
better. You have to back it up with action, action, action." If his
ideas broke with conventions, so did his manner of imparting them.
Irreverent, charismatic, he was called the Lenny Bruce of
psychotherapy. In popular Friday evening seminars that ran for
decades, he counseled, prodded, provoked and entertained groups of 100
or more students, psychologists and others looking for answers, often
lacing his comments with obscenities for effect.
His basic message was that all people are born with a talent "for
crooked thinking" - distortions of perception that sabotage their
innate desire for happiness. But he recognized that people also had
the capacity to change themselves. The role of therapists, Dr. Ellis
argued, is to intervene directly, using strategies and homework
exercises to help patients first learn to accept themselves as they
are (unconditional self-acceptance, he called it) and then to retrain
themselves to avoid destructive emotions - to "establish new ways of
being and behaving," as he put it.
His methods, along with those of Dr. Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist who
was working independently, provided the basis for what is known as
cognitive behavior therapy. A form of talk therapy, it has been shown
to be at least as effective as drugs for many people in treating
anxiety, depression , obsessive-compulsive disorder and other
conditions.
His admirers credited Dr. Ellis with adapting the "talking cure," the
dominant therapy in extended Freudian sessions, to a pragmatic, stop-
your-complaining-and-get-on-with-you-life form of guidance later
popularized by television personalities like Dr. Phil.
Dr. Ellis had such an impact that in a 1982 survey, clinical
psychologists ranked him ahead of Freud when asked to name the figure
who had exerted the greatest influence on their field. (They placed
him second behind Carl Rogers, the founder of humanistic psychology.)
His reputation grew even more in the next two decades.
In 1955, however, when Dr. Ellis introduced his approach, most of the
psychological and psychiatric establishment scorned it. His critics
said he misunderstood the nature and force of emotions. Classical
Freudians also took offense at Dr. Ellis's critical observations about
psychoanalysis and its founder. Dr. Ellis contended that Freud "really
knew very little about sex" and that his view of the Oedipus complex,
as suggesting a universal law of human disturbance, was "foolish."
A sexual liberationist, Dr. Ellis collaborated with Dr. Alfred Kinsey
in his taboo-breaking research on sexual behavior, and his writings
about sex drew complaints from members of the American Psychological
Society. As a base for his work he established the Institute for
Rational Living, now the Albert Ellis Institute, in a townhouse on
East 65th Street in Manhattan. He lived on its top floor.
One day in the spring of 2004, when Dr. Ellis was 90, hard of hearing
and recovering from abdominal surgery, he came downstairs to lead one
of his Friday sessions, just as he had done for 30 years. "Do you
know why your family is trying to control you?" he asked a volunteer
who had joined him in front of the audience. "Because they are out of
their minds!" he said, inserting an unprintable adjective. Another
participant recalled the murder of her sister years ago by a drug
dealer. "Why can't you understand that some people are crazy and
violent and do all kinds of terrible things?" Dr. Ellis declared.
"Until you accept it, you're going to be angry, angry, angry."
Some critics complained that his seminars were more stand-up comedy
than serious lecture. Still, despite his iconoclasm, or perhaps
because of it, rational emotive behavior therapy became one of the
most popular systems of psychotherapy in the 1970's and 80's. In 1985,
the American Psychological Association presented Dr. Ellis with its
award for "distinguished professional contributions."
Dr. Ellis was the author or co-author of more than 60 books, many of
them best sellers. Among them were "A Guide to Successful Marriage,"
"Overcoming Procrastination," "How to Live With a Neurotic," "The Art
of Erotic Seduction," "Sex Without Guilt," "A New Guide to Rational
Living," and "How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable
About Anything - Yes, Anything."
He often went back to his own life experiences to help explain his
positive frame of thinking. Albert Ellis was born on Sept. 27, 1913,
in Pittsburgh, the oldest of three children. As a child he had a
kidney disorder that turned him, he wrote, from sports to books. His
parents moved to the Bronx and separated when he was 11. He wrote that
he had limited but amiable contacts with his father, a traveling
salesman, and that his mother, an amateur actress, was not interested
in domestic life.
But he maintained that the experience had left no scars. "I took my
father's absence and my mother's neglect in stride," he wrote, "and
even felt good about being allowed so much autonomy and independence."
He did well in school, skipped grades, won writing contests and, he
said, liked himself for his accomplishments. But at 19 he was
painfully shy and eager to change his behavior. In one exercise he
staked out a bench in a park near his home, determined to talk to
every woman who sat there alone. In one month, he said, he approached
130 women.
"Thirty walked away immediately," he said in the Times interview. "I
talked with the other 100, for the first time in my life, no matter
how anxious I was. Nobody vomited and ran away. Nobody called the
cops."
Though he got only one date as a result, his shyness disappeared, he
said. He similarly overcame a fear of speaking in public by making
himself do just that, over and over. He became an accomplished public
speaker. Dr. Ellis studied accounting at City College during the
Depression and took up some entrepreneurial schemes after graduating.
In one, he paired used men's jackets and pants of similar colors and
sold them as suits. He wrote fiction but found no publishers. He had
read a good deal about sex and set up a bureau in which he counseled
couples.
His own first marriage, to Karyl Corper, an actress, in 1938, ended in
annulment. His second, in 1956, to Rhoda Winter, a dancer, ended in
divorce. For 37 years, from 1966 to 2003, he lived with a companion
Janet L. Wolfe, a psychologist who had been executive director of the
institute. More recently he married Debbie Joffe-Ellis, a psychologist
and former assistant, who survives him.
After receiving a doctorate in clinical psychology from Columbia in
1947, he spent several years undergoing classical psychoanalysis while
using its techniques in his job at a state mental hygiene clinic in
New Jersey. He quit in 1950 to begin private practice specializing in
sex and marriage therapy and soon started drifting from Freudian
orthodoxy, finding it, he said, a waste of time. He turned to Greek,
Roman and modern philosophers and considered his own experience. Out
of this came rational emotive behavioral therapy, which he decided
would focus not on excavating childhood but on confronting the
irrational thoughts that lead to self-destructive feelings and
behavior. He founded his Manhattan institute in 1959. "I was hated by
practically all psychologists and psychiatrists," he recalled. They
thought his approach was "superficial and stupid," he said, and "they
resented that I said therapy doesn't have to take years."
In 2005, Dr. Ellis sued the institution after it removed him from its
board and canceled his Friday seminars. He and his supporters claimed
that the institute had fallen into the hands of psychologists who were
moving it away from his revolutionary therapy techniques. The board
said it had acted out of economic necessity, asserting that payouts to
Dr. Ellis for medical and other expenses were jeopardizing the
institute's tax-exempt status. Dr. Ellis was by then requiring daily
nursing care. Some board members said they were uncomfortable with his
confrontational style and eccentricities and saw him as a liability.
In January 2006, a state Supreme Court judge ruled that the board had
been wrong in ousting Dr. Ellis without proper notice and reinstated
him. But Ms. Rosellini, his spokeswoman, said Dr. Ellis's relations
with the board remained strained afterward. Despite his failing
health, Dr. Ellis maintained a demanding schedule late into his life.
"I'll retire when I'm dead," he said at 90. "While I'm alive, I want
to keep doing what I want to do. See people. Give workshops. Write and
preach the gospel according to St. Albert."
Copyright 2007
The New York Times Company