Dr Albert Ellis on, well, Freud obviously.
Albert Ellis was my first therapeutic love. He was an American psychiatrist who invented rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT) – basically the psychological process we now call cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. My parents, cleverly spotting a brewing nuttiness (Dad is a psychiatrist and Mum a GP), gave me his Guide to Rational Living when I was about eighteen, and jolly helpful I found it too. I made a fist of my 20s, but I think the whole debacle would have been far worse without Albert Ellis.
I also admired Antony Kidman, an Australian Ellis disciple, who wrote an excellent series of workbooks that they used to sell in ABC shops. Tony is Nicole’s dad. I always thought he must’ve found Tom Cruise’s incendiary ideas about psychiatry particularly distasteful. Cause, you know, they are.
Dr Ellis started out as a psychoanalyst in the 1940s, but later decided childhood trauma has “nothing to do with the price of spinach,” and came to the conclusion that headlines this post. So he thrust off Freudian chicanery, and, by 1955, he’d outlined his ABC method, where A is the Activating Event, B is the beliefs we hold about that event, and C are the Emotional Consequences of our idiotic and delusional Bs. So, for example, A is the fact that our first IVF cycle was cancelled*, B is me extrapolating from that that my second cycle will be identical, and C is a debilitating, self-pitying despondency.
= my bad.
Alternatively, A is the fact that our first IVF cycle was cancelled, B is me thinking that was a weird-arse aberration given my general excellence in all matters and complete inability to fail, and C is me feeling expectant and ecstatic standing in a freshly painted nursery gleefully throwing baby clothes in the air.
Also = my bad. But see how different Bs create different Cs? Obviously, as Sir James Chettam can confirm, the proper way of thinking is the reasonable way.
I wrote to him once. (Albert Ellis, not Sir James, who’s fictional.) I wrote him an email, and he answered it immediately, probably because it was about 1992 and there were only, like, four emails produced that year worldwide. I was going through my Sartre phase (yeah, whatever) and it struck me that in fact it was pretty much the same reasoning. Something happens in the world, and we must intellectually and emotionally position it somewhere, and because we are free, we are free to position it where we will. As that most famous of all nutters, Hamlet, says, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” It’s always puzzled me that people find this nihilistic, when I think it is the very opposite – it’s the very foundation of real virtue. Anyway, I wrote to ask him what the difference was between REBT and existentialism, and he wrote back and said good question, very little, and I was chuffed. I kept that email for ages, but I’ve lost it now.
These days, in the US, more than two-thirds of therapists follow some kind of variant on REBT.
Did everyone really notice that collar and tie? And how come genius crackpots always have greasy hair? Cause it makes their brains juicier?
Hmph.
Anyway, I was thinking about Albert Ellis today, because, fearing I was going out of my fucking mind, I went to see one of the counsellors at the IVF clinic. What a goddamn waste of time. It’s not that the conseller wasn’t lovely; to be sure, she was sweet and chockers with empathy. But – and perhaps I’m too demanding – but there was no stretch or challenge to it. Everything I’m feeling is entirely normal, apparently. In fact I knew that, but I wanted to talk about it all the same.
Anyway, it was futile. What helps me is the hilarious, sophisticated types on the IVF blog network. What helps me is hearing Melvyn Bragg explain about Socrates had to say about virtue. What helps me is imagining Albert Ellis, at four, in hospital with nephritis, saying, “If I die, I die. Fuck it, it’s not the end of the world.”
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Heavily referenced in this post: A New Yorker article about Ellis on his 90th birthday. There is much more to be said about Ellis. He was a brilliant practitioner, but he got the sack from, ironically, the Albert Ellis Institute. He married his assistant, who was Australian, and who they say controlled him, although people who knew him well seem to find that unlikely. Seriously, you should google him.
*I haven’t mentioned this before, but, yeah, didn’t work out. That was a bad week – more on all that later.
