Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [385]
Albert Ellis, a cognitive therapist well known to the public, has said that he was “spurred on” by Rotter’s and others’ writings but that he began practicing and promoting his own rational-emotive therapy (RET), a form of cognitive therapy, in 1955, and was therefore “the first major cognitive-behavioral therapist” and “the father of RET and the grandfather of cognitive-behavioral therapy.”*66
Not exactly a modest statement, but Ellis was not a modest man. He has unblushingly written that he was “one of the most distinguished alumni of Teachers College” and “one of the best-known clinical psychologists, as well as one of the most famous sexologists, in the United States and in the world.” “My ‘old age,’ during the 1980s,” he wrote in 1991, when he was eighty-eight, “has seen my professional and public popularity, as well as that of rational-emotive therapy and cognitive-behavior therapy, steadily progress.”67 He said that “when not absorbed in something big, ongoing, and creative, [I am] easily bored,” and admitted to being a workaholic—but a healthy one—whose typical workday was seventeen hours long, running from 8:30 A.M. to 1:15 A.M.68 Not surprisingly, at ninety-three he was lean, even skinny; his long face was often saturnine but could break into a demonic grin, and except for the lack of a pointed black beard, he looked something like the operatic conception of Mephistopheles.
Even if one discounts the hyperbole, Ellis’s achievements and energy were extraordinary, considering the poor start he had.69 He has described his father as a spendthrift and runaround who gave him no fathering and his mother as given over to bridge, mah-jongg, and other diversions. Young Ellis, who grew up in the Bronx, was hospitalized eight times for nephritis between the ages of five and eight, and was forbidden to play active sports, developed into “something of a sissy” where such activities were concerned, and was shy, introverted, and phobic about speaking in public. All this, he has said, helped him become a “stubborn and pronounced problem solver”:
If life, I said to myself, is going to be so damned rough and hassle-filled, what the devil can I do to live successfully and happily nevertheless? I soon found the answer: use my head! So I figured out how to become my nutty mother’s favorite child, how to get along with both my brother and sister [despite] their continual warring with each other, and how to live fairly happily without giving up my shyness.70
In his teens and twenties, Ellis’s ambition was to become a writer; he produced many unsuccessful manuscripts, but, being practical, took a degree in accounting and another in business and, despite the Depression, was able to get decent jobs. Among his unpublished manuscripts was a vast tome on sexuality, and friends often asked him for sexual advice. He liked counseling them so much that he decided to become a clinical psychologist, and, while holding down a job managing a gift-and-novelty firm, went to graduate school at Teachers College, Columbia University, and received his doctorate in 1947, at thirty-four.
For any normal man, so late an entry into the field would have meant a minor career, but not for Ellis. While working in the New Jersey mental health system for some years, he took four years of psychoanalytic training, began seeing patients of his own in 1948, and by 1952 had a full-time practice in Manhattan. He also began the abundant production of both professional and popular books on sexuality and allied matters; his radical views and frequent penchant for vulgar language made him something of a scalawag in psychotherapy, a role he seems to have delighted in all his life.
Between 1953 and 1955, Ellis began to rebel against psychoanalysis; he found it too slow, too passive (on the part of the analyst), and not suited to his personality. As he explained to Claire Warga, a psychologist who wrote about him in Psychology Today a few years ago:
Patients temporarily felt better from all the talk and attention but didn’t seem