Aaron Beck talks about Ellis' life and work on the occasion of Ellis' passing in 2007. Rational Emotive Behaviour Educators in Whyalla, South Australia continue his work to promote student mental health.
On the Contributions of Dr. Albert Ellis
Aaron T. Beck
A eulogy is a highly subjective matter. It often reflects as much of
the personal narrative of the speaker as it does of the subject. As
Ellis pointed out numerous times, we see the world through our own
filters or lenses.
That said, I will try to tell what Albert Ellis meant to me
personally as well as to the world. We all know Ellis as an explorer,
revolutionary, therapist, theorist, and teacher. But how did these
various roles play out in his actual interactions with his colleagues
and friends?
To describe my personal narrative of Al Ellis, I have to go back many
decades to my beginnings in the field of therapy and research.
Like Ellis, I was trained as a psychoanalyst. Although I always had
some misgivings regarding the Psychoanalytic Establishment, which was
like a religious order in many ways with its authoritarianism, rites of
passage, and demands for obedience to its rituals, I believed that the
theory and therapy had a solid basis. Having caught the research bug
early in life, I was determined to demonstrate through my research that
the theory was correct and skeptics were wrong. In actuality, my
research indicated that I was wrong and the skeptics were right. In
short, I came up with a new theory and therapy which I later called
Cognitive Therapy. Unfortunately, there was nobody I could discuss this
with, except my wife, Phyllis, and daughter, Judith. At this point, Al
came into my life.
He happened to see a couple of my articles published in 1963 and 1964 and made contact with me.
This was particularly significant because at last I had found someone
I could talk to. I soon discovered, of course, that he had broken ranks
with traditional psychotherapy many years previously and had laid out a
new cognitive theory and therapy that he called Rational Therapy and
then Rational Emotive Therapy. I also found that our approaches were
simpatico, and Al graciously reprinted my 2 articles in his house organ,
The Journal of Rational Living.
I also was thrilled to learn that he had directly challenged the
psychotherapy establishment, had established a clinic and a school, and
was a prolific author. I was particularly impressed not only by his
no-nonsense therapy but by his bare knuckled, no-nonsense lectures.
Subsequent to this, Al organized a symposium bringing together the
very few like-minded therapists. These were primarily behavior
therapists who were disillusioned with classical learning theory and
sought to blend cognitive techniques into the established behavior
therapies. Around the same time, Al provided the funding for Don
Meichenbaum to launch his
Cognitive Behavior Therapy Newsletter, which was the precursor of the journal,
Cognitive Therapy and Research.
Al and I continued our interchange over the years. One telling
example of his therapeutic personality occurred when I invited him to do
a Grand Rounds at the University of Pennsylvania Department of
Psychiatry. He interviewed a young lady before a large audience of
residents, medical students, and staff (largely psychoanalysts). He
conducted the interview in his usual directive, brash manner but
underneath this was tenderness and understanding. Afterwards, several of
my colleagues reproached me for having invited him. Their attitude was
that by ignoring the patient's unconscious, he was harming her. Later, I
had occasion to talk to the patient and asked her about the interview.
She remarked, "He is the first person who ever understood me."
Al's uncanny ability to tease out patients' thoughts and feelings was
also obvious in the Friday night sessions at the Institute, which I
attended whenever I had the opportunity.
In recent years, Frank Farley brought us together for dialogues at
the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. Needless
to say, there was an overflow audience at these sessions. These
interchanges were highly informative and entertaining. On one occasion,
Frank asked me to start off the conversation with a summary of my recent
work. When I was finished, Al was asked to respond to my comments. He
replied, "To tell you the truth, I didn't hear a damn thing he said," —
his hearing aid was turned off— but he responded anyhow!
There is much more I could tell about Al but I would like to close
with a personal appreciation of what Al meant not only to me but to the
world. When I was a young boy, I read about the Cedars of Lebanon, grand
trees that lived for over 100 years and were objects of awe and
reverence. It was believed that if these trees were cut down, it would
be the end of civilization because they were irreplaceable.
Al was one of the cedars and he will not be replaced in this
generation. However, he leaves a grand legacy behind him with his
wonderful wife, Debbie, all his students, and the scores of grateful
patients who are living better lives because of him.
https://www.facebook.com/TheAlbertEllisProfessionalLearningCentre
