0.18 Cognitive perspectives on personality development  (Page 17/30)

Much like B. F. Skinner, Ellis hoped to become a writer. Having finished high school at the age of 16, he decided to attend business school at the City College of New York so he might make enough money to support his writing career. However, the Great Depression was just beginning, so there was little opportunity for a young man to make money in business. Nonetheless, he wrote a great deal. He wrote a 500,000-word autobiographical novel. By the age of 28 he had written twenty full-length novels, plays, and books of poetry. None of them were published. He also wrote numerous non-fiction works on sex, philosophy, and politics. None of them were published. However, his research on the topics of sex, love, and marriage made him a popular source of advice amongst his friends. And so he decided to pursue professional training in psychology (Yankura&Dryden, 1994).

Ellis began his studies in the psychology program at Columbia University, and then transferred to the clinical psychology program at Teachers College of Columbia University, receiving a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1947. That year he also began training as a psychoanalyst at the Karen Horney Institute for Psychoanalysis. His training analyst was Dr. Charles Hulbeck, who had been analyzed by Hermann Rorschach. One of the personal issues Ellis addressed during his training analysis was whether or not to marry the women he had begun dating. He eventually decided not to marry her (he was later married twice, one marriage ended in annulment, the other in divorce). Ellis was successful as a psychoanalyst, but many patients couldn’t afford to come as often as was recommended in traditional psychoanalytic theory. Curiously, Ellis noticed that patients who came less often seemed to fare better in therapy, especially when the constraints of limited time caused Ellis to be more proactive in therapy. He pursued this active-directive approach to therapy, and by the mid-1950s he had developed rational emotive behavior therapy to the point where he published his first articles and began describing the technique at professional conferences (Yankura&Dryden, 1994).

Ellis devoted the rest of his career to establishing rational emotive behavior therapy as a significant force in psychotherapy. In 1959 he established the Institute for Rational Living, and by the 1980s there were similar institutes in Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Mexico, and the Netherlands. He has written over 75 books, beginning with How to Live with a Neurotic (Ellis, 1957), hundreds of articles, and he has received many distinguished awards. After 60 years as a psychotherapist, marriage and family counselor, and sex therapist, Ellis has been honored as a fellow of five major associations. He was recognized with the Humanist of the Year Award by the American Humanist Association, the Distinguished Psychologist Award of the Academy of Psychologists in Marital and Family Therapy, the Distinguished Practitioner Award of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists, and the American Psychological Association has recognized him for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Knowledge . In a 1991 survey ranking the “Most Influential Psychotherapist,” Canadian psychologists ranked Ellis #1, whereas American psychologists ranked him second to Carl Rogers, but ahead of third-place Sigmund Freud (Ellis, 1994, 2005; Yankura&Dryden, 1994)!