Ellis transformed mental health care

Published 11:01 pm Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Albert Ellis, a provocative psychologist who repudiated long-held Freudian beliefs to develop a straightforward form of behavioral therapy that has become one of the most widely practiced methods of psychological treatment, died Tuesday at his home in New York. He had pneumonia and had suffered a heart attack in March. He was 93.

Ellis, once an outcast for his iconoclastic beliefs, placed an early emphasis on sex therapy and devised a new approach to treating psychological problems. His methods broke with Freudian psychoanalytical practices, emphasizing residual issues from childhood. Instead, he favored direct confrontation with a patient’s behavior and emotions.

“Neurosis is a high-class name for whining,” he often said.

When Ellis first proposed his ideas in 1955, he was considered something of a crackpot. Later studies have tended to support his theory, now called rational emotive behavioral therapy or, more loosely, cognitive behavioral therapy. According to a survey funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and published this year, more than two-thirds of therapists follow a model first outlined by Ellis.

In 2003, a survey conducted by the American Psychological Association named Ellis the second-most-influential psychological thinker in history, ahead of Freud, B.F. Skinner and Carl Jung. (Canadian psychologist Carl Rogers, who founded the practice known as humanistic psychology, placed first.)

Ellis was helped by a gift for self-promotion and a prolific pen that enabled him to write more than 75 books. One of his first books was “Sex Without Guilt” (1958), which made him almost as notorious as Alfred Kinsey, whose clinical studies revealed a nation more sexually active than most people had imagined.

In 1950, Ellis was among the first therapists to take the revolutionary step of treating couples in joint sessions, long before Masters and Johnson made sex therapy commonplace in the 1970s. Despite his interest in sex, he believed adult anxieties had nothing to do with supposed sexual hang-ups from childhood.

“Unlike Freud,” Ellis said in a 1988 article in Psychology Today, “I did not believe that early sexual issues cause all emotional problems and that parents are responsible for all that comes later.”

Some of his notions have been discredited, including a belief that homosexuality was a neurosis that could be cured by therapy. His confrontational, often profane approach – he was the first psychologist to use four-letter words in addressing the convention of the American Psychological Association – made him many enemies.

In recent years, Ellis and his third wife were at war with the institute in New York that bears his name, saying it had departed from his teachings and deprived him of money for his health care. Through his difficulties, he continued to write and published his 78th book, “The Myth of Self-Esteem,” in 2005.

He had completed an autobiography and at least two other books before his death.