Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [387]
Some of this may seem hard on the patient, but Ellis has always said that confrontational RET works better than nonconfrontational RET. Warmth, on the other hand, can be harmful, in Ellis’s opinion. When still in his psychoanalytic phase, he tried being warm over a ten-month period and found that it pleased his clients and made them feel good but made them sicker—more dependent and needy—than they had been, and he gave it up.75
Ellis formalized his ideas as “the ABC theory of RET.” Activating Events (A’s) in people’s lives are intermingled with their Beliefs (B’s) about those A’s, and largely because of the B’s the result is Consequences (C’s)—emotional and behavioral disturbances. Later on, he spelled out in detail the multiple interactions and feedbacks among the A’s, B’s, and C’s. For instance, a bad C—emotional reaction—feeds back into the belief system and strengthens the B (belief about an experience, and that in turn influences how the sensory system actually evaluates an experience (A).76 The goal of RET is to get the client to make a “profound Basic Philosophic change…to see, to surrender, and to stop reconstructing their core musts that are at the bottom of their dysfunctional Basic Philosophic Assumptions.” In sum: Rational thinking is the source of mental and emotional health.
This sounds simplistic, but it has proven to have considerable appeal. After a slow start, and despite opposition by dynamically oriented therapists, it began to catch on during the 1960s through Ellis’s own ceaseless promoting, the growth of cognitive therapies in general, and the incorporation of RET in textbooks of cognitive and behavioral therapy. Ellis’s practice grew ever busier. In 1959 he had founded an Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy, bought a building on East Sixty-fifth Street in Manhattan to house it, and from then on kept the building filled from morning to late evening with clients, students, and staff.
By the 1970s, although Ellis, his students, and his methods were often attacked in professional journals, RET institutes were being founded in other cities and in Europe. In 1982, a survey of eight hundred clinical and counseling psychologists published in the APA’s American Psychologist showed that Ellis was regarded as currently the second most influential psychotherapist (the first was Carl Rogers, of whom more shortly), and a review of references in three counseling journals found Ellis the most cited author in the early 1980s.77 In 1985 the American Psychological Association gave Ellis its Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions, saying, in part:
Dr. Albert Ellis’ theoretical contributions have had a profound effect on the professional practice of psychology. His theories on the primacy of cognition in psychopathology are at the forefront of practice and research in Clinical Psychology. Dr. Ellis’ theories have importantly encouraged an active-directive approach to psychological treatment, combined with a deep humanistic respect for the uniqueness of the individual.78
But the field of psychotherapy has always been one of many new developments and shifts of popularity. Over the past two decades, Ellis’s key idea has been borrowed, adapted, and practiced within a host of differently named methodologies (generally in a less aggressive manner) by many others. By 2002, the APA annual convention included a roundtable titled “Will the Real Behavior Therapy Stand Up?” Dr. Ellis said on that occasion that his version was the first, and, in his view, still the most effective, but that “the entire field of psychotherapy is more eclectic since the 1980s,” that “behavior therapy has become more multi-modal,” and that the future would be one in which “everyone is stealing from everyone… Within ten years I predict that all behavior therapies will be equally efficacious.”79
To conclude this narrative on a rather dismal note, a few years