Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy
Rational emotive behaviour therapy, and the first sustained cognitive challenge to analysis.
Albert Ellis sets out the working method behind rational emotive therapy, the approach he built while breaking from the psychoanalytic training he had practised. The book argues that emotional disturbance is not the direct product of events or of buried history, but of the beliefs a person repeats about those events. Feeling follows from thinking, and the sentences people tell themselves can be located, questioned, and revised.
For the consulting room, Ellis offers a procedure rather than reassurance. He shows how to trace a distressing feeling back to the demand or absolute judgement sustaining it, how to dispute that judgement with the client present, and how to set active homework so the new thinking is rehearsed outside the session. Case transcripts run through the argument, including his own exchanges with patients.
Published in 1962 and revised in 1994, the book records the moment cognition entered the treatment of feeling as a deliberate technique.
About the author
Albert Ellis
Albert Ellis was an American psychologist, born in 1913 and died in 2007. He trained first in psychoanalysis before breaking with Freudian method, arguing that present beliefs, not buried history, drove distress. In the 1950s he developed rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT), which treats irrational beliefs directly, and set out its principles in Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (1962). He is counted among the early figures who shaped cognitive approaches to psychotherapy.
Details
- 1962
- English
- Citadel Press
- Citadel Press, revised edition, 1994