The Greatest Humanitarian since Gandhi: A Memorial to Albert Ellis

By Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.

Ross H. Miller, Ph.D., Senior Editor of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, has asked if I would write a memorial to Dr. Albert Ellis, who died on Tuesday at the age of 93. Dr. Miller expressed hope that my memories of him might be comforting to other travelers of life. It is with sadness, humility, and honor that I recount a part of my personal history that was deeply touched by this quiet hero.

This past spring, Rowman published my book, The New Rational Therapy: Thinking Your Way to Serenity, Success, and Profound Happiness.  Albert Ellis wrote the preface, and my dedication read, “to my friend and mentor, Albert Ellis, who has supported, taught, and inspired me in countless ways.”  These words are meager alongside the magnitude of this man’s gift to humanity. I am here speaking of the psychological revolution he started in the 1950’s, which changed the face of contemporary psychology forever.  Standing firm against the currents of the strongly entrenched Freudian tradition, it was his unique brand of psychotherapy known as Rational-Emotive Behavior therapy (REBT) that redirected psychology from a lengthy psychoanalytic process delving into unconscious motivation arising from past, traumatic experiences to a relatively short-term therapy focusing on thinking and doing in the here-and-now.

In fact, a survey conducted by the American Psychological Association ranked Albert Ellis above Sigmund Freud as the second most influential psychologist in history. Carl Rogers came in first, and Freud Third.

In memoriam to Albert Ellis, The New York Times had the following to say:

"Irreverent, charismatic, he was called the Lenny Bruce of psychotherapy. In popular Friday evening seminars that ran for decades, he counseled, prodded, provoked and entertained groups of 100 or more students, psychologists and others looking for answers, often lacing his comments with obscenities for effect."

Yet, speaking of Albert Ellis in these terms fails to capture the depths of humanity behind his stage presence. What I will always cherish in this man is his predilection for kindness; his genuineness in caring for the plights of others, the manner in which he resonated emotionally with others during their hardest times. What the New York Times failed to mention (among other things) was that the book he was working on (and unfortunately never completed) before his death was a book on the emotion of love.

I came to know Albert Ellis during a difficult time in my life after my father’s death. My father had suffered a lethal heart attack at the age of 60. At the moment of his heart attack, the phone failed to work (due to a phone line that was not operational). My mother had to run next door to call 911. By the time the paramedics arrived, my father had passed.

I was 28 at the time, nearing the end of a one-year, post-doctoral fellowship, and I was confronting a very bleak job market in the field of academic philosophy. Yet I continued to work, publish, and eventually found a permanent job in academia. Emotionally I was numb. Having never stopped to grieve, I had not given myself an opportunity to curse the universe, damn the phone company, and unleash the fury that simmered inside me.  I was functionally robotic for about seven years.

After my father’s death, I began to formulate an approach to behavioral and emotional problems that used logic and philosophy to correct irrational thinking (a form of REBT now known as Logic-Based Therapy). At the time, I was unaware of the work of Albert Ellis, which antedated my own by about three decades. At the prompting of my wife, Gale S. Cohen, a mental health counselor, I began to study Ellis’ theory. Its keynote was the Stoic principle that it isn’t the events in our lives that upset us, but rather the irrational ideas we generate about these events.

Albert Ellis had systematically cataloged the same irrational ideas I was using to disturb myself. As a philosopher, I was trained to think rationally and logically, and ironically it was my demand to think rationally that kept me in a state of emotional turmoil. Dr. Ellis taught that people primarily cause their own emotional and behavioral disturbances by demanding perfection in a universe that is far less than perfect. In refusing to recognize that philosophers too are fallible, irrational creatures, I prevented myself from working through my anger.

However, once I gave myself permission to be human, I became angry at the universe. I damned the universe over the death of my father, and demanded that such awful things never happen, at least to me. Once I had given myself the opportunity to vent these irrational beliefs, I was in a position to expose and work them through. In this way, utilizing the cognitive behavioral tools of REBT, I was able to rescue myself from the abyss of unhappiness.

I first met Albert Ellis about two decades ago when I enrolled in his REBT certification program and trained under him. Remarkably prolific, having written over eighty books, he was always there to inspire me in my work, read and offer commentary on what I had written, and to promptly answer my queries. He was both mentor and friend. After the death of my father, when I was confused and uncertain about my future, Albert Ellis was there for me as he was for the millions of people who have profited from his incredibly effective self-help books.

In 1959, Dr. Ellis founded the Albert Ellis Institute in Manhattan to advance his theory of REBT. He lived frugally upstairs from the Institute, took a salary of $12,000 per year, donated most of his book royalties to the Institute, and even purchased the building on its behalf. It is therefore sadly ironic that, in 2005, some of the individuals he had mentored and brought to the Institute cancelled his celebrated Friday Night Workshops and ousted him from the Board.  However, Dr. Ellis filed suit against the Institute and, in 2006, the New York Supreme Court reinstated him. The Court argued that the alleged reasons for removing him from the board without notice were “disingenuous."

This past spring, I visited him as he lay ill, in a weakened condition in a New York nursing facility, with his devoted wife, Debbie Ellis, by his side.  I held his hand, he looked into my eyes, and eventually he fell asleep holding my hand.

For me, the world now has an indelibly empty place without him; yet it is so much the better for his having been in it. I mourn his death, but not in the same way I mourned the death of my father. I know well what he would tell me about such destructive, self-defeating ideation. And his legacy lives on.  Albert Ellis didn’t leave biological children, but he has nurtured disciples who have formed an REBT Network dedicated to carrying on his life’s work.

The New York Times compared him to Lenny Bruce. But there is another comparison that better captures the essense of this incredibly kind man. In 2004, in the off Broadway play, Trumbo, starring Paul Newman, Albert Ellis was heralded as "the greatest humanitarian since Gandhi." This is just how he deserves to be remembered.

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., is executive co-director and co-founder of the American Society for Philosophy, Counseling, and Psychotherapy; professor and chair at the Indian River College; editor-in-chief and founder of The International Journal of Applied Philosophy and The International Journal of Philosophical Practice.

 

Comments

[brandon]

thanks for introducing me to Ellis's work I was unfamiliar

[Gayle Rosellini]

Elliot, thank you for your wonderful tribute to Albert Ellis. It will be an honor to join you in carrying on Al's life work so that future generations may benefit as we have from his philosophy of rationality, acceptance and action.