July 24, 2007

Ellis Dies at 93

Since Morris is back and Armand is talking psych, I wanted to note that Albert Ellis passed away:

Albert Ellis, whose streamlined, confrontational approach to psychotherapy made him one of the most influential and provocative figures in modern psychology, died early today at his home in an apartment above the institute he founded Manhattan. He was 93. The cause was kidney and heart failure, said a friend and associate, Gayle Rosellini.

...

Where the Freudians maintained that a painstaking exploration of childhood experience was critical to understanding neurosis and curing it, Dr. Ellis believed in short-term therapy that called on patients to focus on what was happening in their lives at the moment and to take immediate action to change their behavior. Neurosis, he said, was "just a high-class word for whining."

"The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you feel better," he told The New York Times in an interview in 2004. "But you don't get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action."

If his ideas broke with conventions, so did his manner of imparting them. Irreverent, charismatic, he was called the Lenny Bruce of psychotherapy. In popular Friday evening seminars that ran for decades, he counseled, prodded, provoked and entertained groups of 100 or more students, psychologists and others looking for answers, often lacing his comments with obscenities for effect.

Posted by binky at July 24, 2007 02:38 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Health


Comments

Sad. He was one of a long line of therapists (including Freud, behaviorists, associationists, gestaltists, humanists, and Milton Erikson) who pointed out the shortcomings of what was practiced before and offered another explanation.

I might disagree with him in that the part of the brain that explains things tends congrue with a person's mood state (if I feel good, then I begin to think good things will happen), so feeling good can be the solution to psychological problems such as fragmentation of the real from the ideal self (if I feel good, then I can experience my true experience rather than retreating to an ideal fantasy of how life should be, such that I get more information about my actual experience) and learned helplessness in which a person because of felt, visceral experiences learns not to look for new opportunities even when they become available. The more focused I become on problems without consideration for feeling good, the more prone I may be to the magical thinking of worry rather than allowing the deliberation without attention effect to work its natural wonders.

But of course his disputing beliefs is a way of intervening at another level (semantic over visceral), which can also work well with fragmentation resulting from misunderstanding or misexpectation that all messages a person receives should point in the same direction. Done poorly, it can break down a person's system of understanding by not replacing it and leaving insecurity, and it can increase fragmentation by distancing from help clients who come to believe they're so messed up that even their therapist doesn't get their experienced reality that they're messed up.

Requiring action is an important option because it transforms people at many levels by affecting their actions, their perceptions while acting, and their feelings about those actions and perceptions, proper grounding for any set of beliefs. And of course there's less temptation for a therapist to be an ass to clients and believe they're doing it for the good of their clients as there is with disputing beliefs, which also holds true for the other extreme a la Frank Pittman who focuses on the presence of prescriptions as Ellis focused on the presence of their absence.

Calling what a person thinks BS typically only works (like most therapies) if it's an expression of that therapist's authenticity (back to Rogers), if rapport is established, and if a client does not identify strongly with their beliefs, such as borderline individuals who may view disputation of beliefs as a personal attack, threatening their sense of security in the world.

He will be missed. Thanks for the post in my honor, Binky.

Posted by: Morris at July 26, 2007 12:01 AM | PERMALINK
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