Albert Ellis, 93, Profane and Practical Therapy Guru

Using wisdom derived from the Greek philosopher Epictetus and street smarts born of his days selling substitute suit pants during the Depression, Albert Ellis, who died yesterday at 93, fought Sigmund Freud to at least a draw.Foul-mouthed and famous for his tumultuous Friday-night therapy seminars at the Albert Ellis Institute, housed in an East 65th Street townhouse, Ellis insisted that short, directed therapy was what most neurotics needed, even while he conceded that “all humans are out of their f—minds — every single one of them.”Ellis’s program of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is generally considered the groundwork for much of today’s cognitive therapy. In 1982, a survey of North American clinical psychologists named him the second most influential therapist, one place ahead of Freud, whom Ellis despised. “Freud was out of his f— mind,” Ellis told the New Yorker in 2003. (Named most influential was a humanistic therapist, Carl Rogers.)Trained as a psychoanalyst in the 1940s by a disciple of Hermann Rorschach, Ellis soon rejected Freudian orthodoxy, which discouraged the therapist from leading the patient’s talk therapy too actively.“I found that it intensively went into every irrelevancy under the sun — and that it didn’t work,” Ellis told Psychology Today in 2001. “People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change.”Seeking a more direct route to overcoming neurosis, Ellis designed what he at first called “rational therapy,” using insights culled from classical philosophers as well as contemporary theologians such as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Neibuhr, who counseled acceptance of reality and positive action.In addition to taking private patients, Ellis, beginning with “The Folklore of Sex” (1951), published book after book — more than 70 by some counts — of practical advice on relationships, overcoming problems, sex, and myriad therapeutic topics, all pitched in the kind of no-nonsense language that would make Dr. Phil proud. Coming as they did in advance of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the books caused significant controversy and for many years were published by the notorious purveyor of all things blue, Lyle Stuart.Some of the works today appear quaint, dated, or simply wrong-headed, such as “Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cures” (1965). But more of them seem like the first great blast of a sensible sex and life advice industry that Ellis was instrumental in founding. Despite his 1965 book title, he was an early supporter of gay rights, and where Kinsey wrote of sex, Ellis wrote also of love.The guru of cognitive therapy — “deal with it” was perhaps his most frequent advice — overcame obstacles of his own. Born September 27, 1913, in Pittsburgh, Ellis often described growing up with a distant father and an egocentric, detached mother. They divorced when he was 12.Ellis had fond memories of being discovered playing doctor in the altogether at age 5 with a girl neighbor. A bad case of nephritis kept him indoors, and he was a bookish, introverted child. As a teenager, he cured himself first of shyness — by approaching more than 100 women and forcing himself to converse with them — and later of a phobia of public speaking. Such experiences would later become the foundation of his therapeutic model.Ellis studied accounting at City College and aspired to write the Great American Novel. He supported himself with odd jobs, such as finding replacement pants for people whose jackets were in good repair. He eventually earned a master’s degree in psychology at Columbia University, and then, in 1947, a doctorate. Unlike many analysts of the day, he was not a medical doctor. He taught at Rutgers University and New York University, and worked for various state agencies in New Jersey.In 1959, Ellis founded the Institute for Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Renamed the Albert Ellis Institute, it was chartered by the New York State Board of Regents as a training institute. Ellis lived on the top floor of the East Side townhouse.Ellis’s personal life was, for professional reasons, something of an open book. He was twice divorced and lived for decades with the executive director of his institute, Janet Wolfe, in an open relationship. He explained being childless in the Psychology Today interview: “I haven’t got the time to take the kids to the g— ballgame.” In recent years, while continuing to issue a stream of books, including “The Road to Tolerance” (2004) and “The Myth of Self-Esteem” (2005), he had health setbacks that required round-the-clock nursing; he also grew increasingly deaf. The Friday-night sessions seemed to become loonier and less organized, and in 2005, his institute attempted to remove him from its board and from his floor in the townhouse. Ellis took the institute to court and won. When he died, he was at home.

Albert Ellis, 93, Profane and Practical Therapy Guru

Albert Ellis, 93, Profane and Practical Therapy Guru

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