Albert Ellis

Lore & Background

Ellis was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in The Bronx borough of New York City. His paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, while his maternal grandfather originated from Galicia, Poland in Austria-Hungary. He was the eldest of three children.

His father, Harry, was a broker, often away from home, and his parents divorced by his teenage years. His mother, Hattie, was described by Ellis as a self-absorbed woman with a bipolar disorder. Ellis suffered numerous health problems in youth, including kidney disease and tonsillitis leading to emergency surgery. He committed numerous sexual assaults against women during his teens and early twenties, engaging in nonconsensual frotteurism.

He forced himself to talk to 100 women at age 19 to overcome his fear of rejection. He earned a BA in business from City College of New York Downtown in 1934, then an MA in clinical psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University in June 1943, and a PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia in 1947. He began a part-time private practice while still working on his PhD.

Reader's Guide

Ellis's psychological career began after he became disillusioned with psychoanalysis. Influenced by Karen Horney, Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan, Alfred Korzybski, and stoic philosophy, he developed rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). By January 1953 his break with psychoanalysis was complete, and he began calling himself a rational therapist. In 1955 he presented rational therapy (RT), which stressed actively working to change a client's self-defeating beliefs by demonstrating their irrationality.

In 1957 he formally set forth the first cognitive behavioral therapy. He published How to Live with a Neurotic in 1959. In 1960 he presented a paper on his approach at the APA convention in Chicago.

Did You Know?

• Based on a 1982 professional survey of American and Canadian psychologists, Ellis was considered the second most influential psychotherapist in history, after Carl Rogers and ahead of Sigmund Freud.
• Psychology Today noted that 'No individual—not even Freud himself—has had a greater impact on modern psychotherapy.'
• He committed hundreds of nonconsensual frotteurist acts during his teens and early twenties, later expressing guilt and remorse.