Sito di Mario Di Pietro
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Educazione Razionale Emotiva, Mario Di Pietro
ALBERT ELLIS
"There is virtually nothing in which I delight
more," says Albert Ellis, "than throwing myself into a good and difficult
problem." Rational emotive behavior therapy is a direct and efficient problem-solving
method, well suited to Ellis' personality. His self-assurance -- some would
even say arrogance -- enables him to confront his clients about their beliefs
and tell them what is rational and what isn't. The success of his clinical
practice, his training institute, and his books testify that his methods
work for many and that he is one of America's most influential therapists.
Ellis was born in Pittsburgh in 1913 and
raised in New York City. He made the best of a difficult childhood by using
his head and becoming, in his words, "a stubborn and pronounced problem-solver." A
serious kidney disorder turned his attention from sports to books, and the
strife in his family (his parents were divorced when he was 12) led him to
work at understanding others. In junior high school Ellis set his sights
on becoming the Great American Novelist. He planned to study accounting in
high school and college, make enough money to retire at 30, and write without
the pressure of financial need. The Great Depression put an end to his vision,
but he made it through college in 1934 with a degree in business administration
from the City University of New York.
His first venture in the business world was a pants-matching business he started
with his brother. They scoured the New York garment auctions for pants to match
their customer's still-usable coats. In 1938, he became the personnel manager
for a gift and novelty firm. Ellis devoted most of his spare time to writing
short stories, plays, novels, comic poetry, essays and nonfiction books. By
the time he was 28, he had finished almost two dozen full-length manuscripts,
but had not been able to get them published.
He realized his future did not lie in writing fiction, and turned exclusively
to nonfiction, to promoting what he called the "sex-family revolution." As
he collected more and more materials for a treatise called "The Case for Sexual
Liberty," many of his friends began regarding him as something of an expert
on the subject. T
hey often asked for advice, and Ellis discovered that he liked counseling as
well as writing. In 1942 he returned to school, entering the clinical-psychology
program at Columbia. He started a part-time private practice in family and
sex counseling soon after he received his master's degree in 1943. At the time
Columbia awarded him a doctorate in 1947 Ellis had come to believe that psychoanalysis
was the deepest and most effective form of therapy. He decided to undertake
a training analysis, and "become an outstanding psychoanalyst the next few
years." The psychoanalytic institutes refused to take trainees without M.D.s,
but he found an analyst with the Karen Horney group who agreed to work with
him. Ellis completed a full analysis and began to practice classical psychoanalysis
under his teacher's direction. In the late 1940s he taught at Rutgers and New
York University, and was the senior clinical psychologist at the Northern New
Jersey Mental Hygiene Clinic. He also became the chief psychologist at the
New Jersey Diagnostic Center and then at the New Jersey Department of Institutions
and Agencies. But Ellis' faith in psychoanalysis was rapidly crumbling.
He discovered that when he saw clients only once a week or even every other
week, they progressed as well as when he saw them daily. He took a more active
role, interjecting advice and direct interpretations as he did when he was
counseling people with family or sex problems. His clients seemed to improve
more quickly than when he used passive psychoanalytic procedures.
And remembering that before he underwent analysis, he had worked through many
of his own problems by reading and practicing the philosophies or Epictetus,
Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza and Bertrand Russell, he began to teach his clients
the principles that had worked for him. By 1955 Ellis had given up psychoanalysis
entirely, and instead was concentrating on changing people's behavior by confronting
them with their irrational beliefs and persuading them to adopt rational ones.
This role was more to Ellis' taste, for he could be more honestly himself. "When
I became rational-emotive," he said, "my own personality processes really began
to vibrate." He published his first book on REBT, How to Live with a Neurotic,
in 1957. Two years later he organized the Institute for Rational Living, where
he held workshops to teach his principles to other therapists.
The Art and Science of Love, his first really successful book, appeared in
1960, and he has now published 54 books and over 600 articles on REBT, sex
and marriage. He is currently the President of the Institute for Rational-Emotive
Therapy in New York, which offers a full-time training program, and operates
a large psychological clinic. REBT is a therapy growing in popularity (thousands
now practice it), but also a very old one. It owes at least as much to the
Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, as to Sigmund Freud. Yet REBT's origin is not
to be found simply in the logical temperament Ellis shares with a long line
of rational philosophers. "The irrationalities -- even in regard to REBT --
which I have beautifully tolerated for many years of my life would tend to
belie this hypothesis," he says. But he loathes inefficiency and will not tolerate
passivity, and these traits were important forces in REBT's evolution. "I love
my work and work at my loving," Ellis says. "That is the secret of my present
unusually happy state."
--Gary Gregg
