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Albert Ellis, 93, Influential Psychotherapist, Dies – New York Times

Albert Ellis, 93, Influential Psychotherapist, Dies Michael Nagle for The New York Times, 2004

Dr. Ellis’s approach, developed in the 1950s, challenged the slow-moving methodology of Sigmund Freud, which was the prevailing psychotherapeutic treatment at the time.

Albert Ellis, whose innovative straight-talk approach to psychotherapy made him one of the most influential and provocative figures in modern psychology, died yesterday at his home above the institute he founded in Manhattan. He was 93.
The cause, after extended illness, was kidney and heart failure, said a friend and spokeswoman, 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 1950s, 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 to feel better,” he said in a 2004 article in The New York Times. “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,” or 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 T. 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-complaining-and-get-on-with-your-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 C. Kinsey in his taboo-breaking research on sexual behavior, and his writings about sex drew complaints from members of the American Psychological Association.

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 there on the top floor.

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