Dr. Albert Ellis

Albert Ellis Born September 27, 1913 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US Died July 24, 2007 (aged 93) New York, New York, US Residence United States Nationality American Known for Formulating and developing rational emotive behavior therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy Awards 2003 award from the Association for Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (UK), Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award, Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies 1996 Outstanding Clinician Award, American Psychological Association 1985 award for Distinguished professional contributions to Applied Research, American Humanist Association 1971 award for "Humanist of the Year", New York State Psychological Association 2006 Lifetime Distinguished Service Award, American Counseling Association 1988 ACA Professional Development Award, National Association of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapists' Outstanding Contributions to CBT Award, American Psychological Association 2013 Award For Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology Scientific career Fields Clinical psychology, philosophy and psychotherapy Albert Ellis (September 27, 1913 – July 24, 2007) was an American psychologist who in 1955 developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). He held MA and PhD degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University and the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). He also founded and was the President of the New York City-based Albert Ellis Institute for decades. He is generally considered to be one of the originators of the cognitive revolutionary paradigm shift in psychotherapy and one of the founders of cognitive-behavioral therapies. Based on a 1982 professional survey of US and Canadian psychologists, he was considered as the second most influential psychotherapist in history (Carl Rogers ranked first in the survey; Sigmund Freud was ranked third).[3][4] Psychology Today noted, "No individual—not even Freud himself—has had a greater impact on modern psychotherapy." Ellis was born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US, in 1913. He was the eldest of three children. Ellis' father was a businessman, often away from home on business trips, who reportedly showed only a modicum of affection to his children. In his autobiography, Ellis characterized his mother as a self-absorbed woman with a bipolar disorder. At times, according to Ellis, she was a "bustling chatterbox who never listened." She would expound on her strong opinions on most subjects, but rarely provided a factual basis for these views. Like his father, Ellis' mother was emotionally distant from her children. Ellis recounted that she was often sleeping when he left for school and usually not home when he returned. Instead of reporting feeling bitter, he took on the responsibility of caring for his siblings. He purchased an alarm clock with his own money and woke and dressed his younger brother and sister. When the Great Depression struck, all three children sought work to assist the family. Ellis was sickly as a child and suffered numerous health problems throughout his youth. At the age of five he was hospitalized with a kidney disease.He was also hospitalized with tonsillitis, which led to a severe streptococcal infection requiring emergency surgery. He reported that he had eight hospitalizations between the ages of five and seven, one of which lasted nearly a year. His parents provided little emotional support for him during these years, rarely visiting or consoling him. Ellis stated that he learned to confront his adversities as he had "developed a growing indifference to that dereliction". Illness was to follow Ellis throughout his life; at age 40 he developed diabetes. Ellis had exaggerated fears of speaking in public and during his adolescence, he was extremely shy around women. At age 19, already showing signs of thinking like a cognitive-behavioral therapist, he forced himself to talk to 100 women in the Bronx Botanical Gardens over a period of a month. Even though he did not get a date, he reported that he desensitized himself to his fear of rejection by women. Ellis entered the field of clinical psychology after first earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in business from what was then known as the City College of New York Downtown in 1934. He began a brief career in business, followed by one as a writer. These endeavors took place during the Great Depression that began in 1929, and Ellis found that business was poor and had no success in publishing his fiction. Finding that he could write non-fiction well, Ellis researched and wrote on human sexuality. His lay counseling in this subject convinced him to seek a new career in clinical psychology. In 1942, Ellis began his studies for a PhD in clinical psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, which trained psychologists mostly in psychoanalysis. He completed his Master of Arts in clinical psychology from Teachers College in June 1943, and started a part-time private practice while still working on his PhD degree—possibly because there was no licensing of psychologists in New York at that time. Ellis began publishing articles even before receiving his PhD; in 1946 he wrote a critique of many widely used pencil-and-paper personality tests. He concluded that only the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory met the standards of a research-based instrument. In 1947, he was awarded a PhD in Clinical Psychology at Columbia, and at that time Ellis had come to believe that psychoanalysis was the deepest and most effective form of therapy. Like most psychologists of that time, he was interested in the theories of Sigmund Freud. He sought additional training in psychoanalysis and then began to practice classical psychoanalysis. Shortly after receiving his PhD in 1947, Ellis began a Jungian analysis and program of supervision with Richard Hulbeck, a leading analyst at the Karen Horney Institute (whose own analyst had been Hermann Rorschach, the developer of the Rorschach inkblot test). At that time he taught at New York University, Rutgers University, and Pittsburg State University[10] and held a couple of leading staff positions. At this time, Ellis' faith in psychoanalysis was gradually crumbling. The writings of Karen Horney, Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan would be some of the influences in Ellis's thinking and played a role in shaping his psychological models. Ellis credits Alfred Korzybski, his book, Science and Sanity, and general semantics for starting him on the philosophical path for founding rational therapy. In addition, modern and ancient philosophy (particularly stoicism), and his own experiences heavily influenced his new theoretical developments to psychotherapy. Ellis acknowledged that his therapy was "by no means entirely new", as in particular Paul Charles Dubois's "rational persuasion" had prefigured some of its main principals; Ellis stated he had read him some years after inventing his therapy, but had studied Émile Coué since a young age. From the late 1940s onwards, Ellis worked on rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT), and by January 1953 his break with psychoanalysis was complete, and he began calling himself a rational therapist. Ellis was now advocating a new more active and directive type of psychotherapy. In 1955, he presented rational therapy (RT). In RT, the therapist sought to help the client understand—and act on the understanding—that his personal philosophy contained beliefs that contributed to his own emotional pain. This new approach stressed actively working to change a client's self-defeating beliefs and behaviours by demonstrating their irrationality, self-defeatism and rigidity. Ellis believed that through rational analysis and cognitive reconstruction, people could understand their self-defeatingness in light of their core irrational beliefs and then develop more rational constructs. In 1954, Ellis began teaching his new techniques to other therapists, and by 1957, he formally set forth the first cognitive behavior therapy by proposing that therapists help people adjust their thinking and behavior as the treatment for emotional and behavioral problems. Two years later, Ellis published How to Live with a Neurotic, which elaborated on his new method. In 1960, Ellis presented a paper on his new approach at the American Psychological Association (APA) convention in Chicago. There was mild interest, but few recognized that the paradigm set forth would become the zeitgeist within a generation. At that time, the prevailing interest in experimental psychology was behaviorism, while in clinical psychology it was the psychoanalytic schools of notables such as Freud, Jung, Adler, and Perls. Despite the fact that Ellis' approach emphasized cognitive, emotive, and behavioral methods, his strong cognitive emphasis provoked the psycho-therapeutic establishment with the possible exception of the followers of Adler. Consequently, he was often received with significant hostility at professional conferences and in print. He regularly held seminars where he would bring a participant up on stage and treat them. His own therapeutic style was famed for often being delivered in a rough, confrontational style; however, it should not be confused with his rational-emotive and cognitive-behavioral therapy school that is practiced by his students and followers in a large variety of therapeutic styles (e.g., often depending on client's personality, client's clinical problem, and evidence-based information regarding the appropriate intervention, but also including therapist's own preference). Despite the relative slow adoption of his approach in the beginning, Ellis founded his own institute. The Institute for Rational Living was founded as a non-profit organization in 1959. By 1968, it was chartered by the New York State Board of Regents as a training institute and psychological clinic.