Albert Ellis cured his own shyness by approaching 100 strangers in a month
At 19, terrified of rejection, Albert Ellis made himself start conversations with 100 women in the Bronx Botanical Garden over a single month. Not one agreed to a date, but his fear faded. Decades later that do-it-anyway logic became rational emotive behaviour therapy, an early cornerstone of cognitive-behavioural treatment.
Ellis was born in Pittsburgh on 27 September 1913 and grew up in the Bronx, the eldest of three. By his own account his father, a broker, was usually away, and his mother was self-absorbed and rarely home, so the boy bought an alarm clock with his own money to wake and dress his younger siblings. Illness dogged him: eight hospital stays between five and seven, one lasting almost a year, and diabetes from age 40. His autobiography also confesses to repeatedly groping women in crowded places as a teenager and young man, conduct he later said he felt guilty about.
He took a business degree from City College in 1934, failed at commerce and at fiction during the Depression, and found he could write well about human sexuality. Informal counselling on that subject steered him to clinical psychology at Teachers College, Columbia, where the training was mostly psychoanalytic. He completed his doctorate in 1947, trained further in analysis, and practised it, while his confidence in the method slowly drained away.
By January 1953 he had broken with psychoanalysis and was calling himself a rational therapist. Borrowing from Stoic philosophy, Alfred Korzybski's general semantics and writers such as Karen Horney and Alfred Adler, he argued that people suffer largely because of rigid, self-defeating beliefs, and that a therapist should actively challenge them. He presented rational therapy in 1955 and by 1957 had laid out what counts as the first cognitive behavioural therapy. A 1960 talk at the American Psychological Association drew only mild interest, and conferences often met him with hostility.
He founded the Institute for Rational Living as a non-profit in 1959, and New York's Board of Regents chartered it as a training clinic in 1968. His stage demonstrations, treating volunteers in front of audiences, were famously blunt, though his followers practise the method in many gentler styles. In the 1960s he was also regarded as a founder of the American sexual revolution. A 1982 survey of psychologists ranked him the second most influential psychotherapist, after Carl Rogers and ahead of Freud. He died on 24 July 2007.
Source: Albert Ellis
