Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [386]
After experimenting for two years with techniques more to his taste, he worked out rational-emotive therapy, and in 1955 began practicing it and writing about it. Its essence, he wrote in an early paper, is that the emotions associated with neurosis are “the result of illogical, unrealistic, irrational, inflexible, and childish thinking,” and that the cure lies in the therapist’s “unmasking” the client’s illogical and self-defeating thinking and teaching him how to think “in a more logical, self-helping way.”72 The overall tone of the therapist’s—or at least Ellis’s—approach is indicated by certain key words. The therapist should “make a forthright, unequivocal attack on the client’s general and specific irrational ideas,” “try to induce him to adopt more rational ones in their place,” and “keep pounding away, time and again, at the illogical ideas which underlie the client’s fears.”
It is not easy to convey on the printed page the essence of RET, as practiced by Ellis; his provocative and challenging manner has to be imagined. The following sample (abridged here) does however capture something of the flavor and process of his method. It is part of an early session with a twenty-six-year-old commercial artist who has a steady girlfriend and has sex with her regularly but is afraid of becoming a homosexual.
THERAPIST: What’s the main thing that’s bothering you?
CLIENT: I have a fear of turning homosexual—a real fear of it!
T: Because “if I became a homosexual—” what?
C: I don’t know. It really gets me down. It gets me to a point where I’m doubting every day. I do doubt everything, anyway.
T: Yes. But let’s get back to—answer the question: “If I were a homosexual, what would that make me?”
C: [Pause] I don’t know.
T: Yes, you do! Now, I can give you the answer to the question. But let’s see if you can get it.
C: [Pause] Less than a person?
T: Yes. Quite obviously, you’re saying, “I’m bad enough. But if I were homosexual, that would make me a total shit!”… Why would you be?
C: [Pause]
T: Not, why would you think you were? But why would you actually be a shit if you were the one out of a hundred who couldn’t make it with girls and the other ninety-nine could?*
C: [Long pause]
T: You haven’t proved it to me yet! Why would you be no good?
Worthless?
C: [Long pause] Because I’m not.
T: You’re not what?
C: I’m not part of the ninety-nine.
T: “I’m not part and I should—”
C: I should be.
T: Why? If you really are homosexual, you are a homosexual. Now, why should you be non homosexual if you’re really a homosexual? That doesn’t make sense.
C: [Long pause]
T: See what a bind you’re in?
C: Yeah.
T: You’re taking the sane statement “It would be desirable to be heterosexual if I were gay,” and translating it into “Therefore, I should be.” Isn’t that what you’re doing?
C: Yeah.
T: But does that make sense? It doesn’t!73
And a brief passage from a session with another client:
T: The same crap! It’s always the same crap. Now if you would look at the crap—instead of “Oh, how stupid I am! He hates me! I think I’ll kill myself”—then you’d get better right away.
C: You’ve been listening! (laughs)
T: Listening to what?
C: (laughs) Those wild statements in my mind, like that, that I make.
T: That’s right! And according to my theory, people couldn’t get upset unless they made those nutty statements to themselves…If I thought you were the worst shit who ever existed, well that’s my opinion. And I’m entitled to it. But does it make you a turd?
C: No.
T: What makes you a turd?
C: Thinking that you are.
T: That’s right! Your belief that you are. That’s the only thing that could ever do it. And you never