Albert Ellis

Albert Ellis was born on September 27, 1913, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire and Galicia. The eldest of three children, he was raised in the Bronx by emotionally distant parents and endured eight childhood hospitalizations for kidney disease, tonsillitis and streptococcal infection, one nearly a year long. At nineteen he confronted his social anxiety by forcing himself to approach 100 women over a month in the Bronx Botanical Gardens — an early cognitive-behavioral self-experiment. In his autobiography he also candidly admitted to hundreds of non-consensual frotteurism acts during his teens and twenties, behavior that today is recognized as serious sexual assault and is part of any honest assessment of his legacy.

After a B.A. in business from City College of New York in 1934 and unsuccessful careers in business and fiction, Ellis turned to non-fiction on human sexuality and then to clinical psychology, earning an M.A. (1943) and Ph.D. (1947) from Columbia's Teachers College. He trained as a Jungian analyst at the Karen Horney Institute, but disillusioned with the inefficiency of long-form analysis, he broke from psychoanalysis by 1953.

In 1955 Ellis presented his "rational therapy." The framework later codified as the ABC model — that activating events (A) do not directly cause emotional consequences (C); the intervening factor is beliefs (B), especially the rigid "musts" — drew on his clinical observation, Alfred Korzybski's general semantics, and Stoic philosophy, with explicit citations of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. He founded the non-profit Institute for Rational Living (later the Albert Ellis Institute) in Manhattan in 1959, published the landmark Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy in 1962, and in 1995 renamed his system Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). In a 1982 survey of US and Canadian clinical psychologists, he was ranked the second most influential psychotherapist in history (after Carl Rogers and ahead of Freud), and after 1957 he was the most-cited author in US psychology journals. He authored more than 80 books and over 1,200 articles in his lifetime.

His legacy carries both credit and debit. On the credit side, REBT — by targeting cognition to produce short-term emotional and behavioral change — accelerated the entire cognitive-behavioral movement. He received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award in 1971, the APA's Distinguished Professional Contribution Award in 1985, and a posthumous APA Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions in 2013. On the debit side, his confrontational and often abrasive session style was criticized as mechanistic and invasive; his public stage demonstrations split opinion. His 1965 book Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cure treated homosexuality as pathology — a position he revised in 1976 after the APA's 1973 depathologization, but the original remains an indelible mark. In 2005 he was removed from the board of the institute he had founded, in a dispute over governance; a New York court reinstated him in January 2006, but his final years were consumed by litigation against the very board members he had once appointed.

He died on July 24, 2007, in his Manhattan home at age 93 of kidney and heart failure. His establishing of short, evidence-based psychotherapy is a decisive achievement; the shadow of his personal conduct and institutional rupture remains part of the testimony, and any fair assessment of Ellis must weigh both.